Ever After
by Gandalf3213
Summary: After everything, Harry isn't sure if he knows how to be himself without Voldemort to worry about. No one quite knows how to stop grieving  or, really, where to begin  and there's the terrifying business of couples...they have to learn to live Ever After.
1. The First Night

_"Understanding is the first key to acceptance, and only with acceptance can there be recovery." **Dumbledore**_

**The First Night**

**Lee** didn't know where he was going, but he, Lee, would follow George Weasley to the end of the Earth if it meant making the second twin stop hurting so badly. They ended up at the Burrow, the first ones to leave Hogwarts. George had taken Fred's body and promptly discarded it on the ground and now collapsed in a heap next to it, crying and crying.

"George…" Lee began and then gave up. He couldn't _do_ this. He couldn't comfort grief when his own was so palpable, so raw and overpowering that he wanted to join in on the crying. But he couldn't and Lee, as the other Weasleys often felt in the hours and days and weeks to come, felt that he didn't deserve to cry because George, who was half of who Fred _was_, kept on living, kept on breathing, and if that was good enough for George than it was good enough for him.

So he didn't cry. Lee Jordan managed to stand guard over the twins he'd become so deeply attached to over the last eight years, the boys who were men who had abandoned their dream shop to come live with him on the run, doling out the worst news with smiles on their faces.

Later, the grief would hit him at different points in the day. When he was at the grocer's, or having a conversation or, more often, in his bed, alone, he would think to himself "Fred Weasley is dead."

And the grief would start all over again.

**Ron** couldn't bring himself to move the two feet over to his own bed.

First was the adrenaline, pounding through his system that he knew would wear off at any second leaving him bone tired, but for now he couldn't even think about sleep. The dragon, the Room of Requirement, seeing Harry, dead, in Hagrid's arms, watching the goat erupt from Aberfoth's wand…the day could be a year of anyone else's life.

And he knew, deep, deep down that a lot of good had come out of what they had done. For one, Voldemort was dead (he would process that later. For now, he just knew that they got to sleep without worrying about having their throats slit.) Hermione…blimey, Hermione had kissed him right in the middle of the battle…

The Chamber of Secrets, leaping out of the way of Crabbe's killing curse, being buried under a pile of fake, burning cups…oh, how Ron needed a pensieve!

"Fred," Harry said quietly, looking out onto the grounds. From their view at Gryffindor tower they could see celebrations taking place on the front lawn in the early dew of the dawn. Ron felt detached from that merriment, as if he was watching his life happening from afar.

"What's that, mate?" Ron asked, looking at Harry blankly. There it was, that drop in adrenaline, and now he was tired, so, so tired. "What'd you say?"

"Fred." And Ron's face remained impassive. He didn't have the energy anymore to mourn his brother, one of the pair that he'd always admired, idolized, one of the pair who always protected him in their haphazard way. "And Lupin, and Tonks…"

"We'll do it in the morning, Harry." Ron said, patting Harry's knee for fear that the other boy would get up. "Seriously, Harry, I think we deserve this. We'll sleep and let other people worry about it for once."

"Fred," Harry said accusingly, "Lupin and Tonks and who knows who else?"

"Later." Ron promised, "Really, mate, you've had a rough day. Dying and all…" And a lump filled Ron's throat, remembering how it was worse, ten times worse, to see Harry limp in the arms of Hagrid than to see Fred's blank eyes staring up at him. For Harry wasn't just The Chosen One or The Boy Who Lived. Harry was his best friend in the world. And Harry had died.

"Yeah," Harry agreed, still not looking convinced. Still, sheer exhaustion drove all men to the breaking point. "Yeah…later."

"I'll be awake, Harry." Ron promised, because thinking of dead Harry had effectively driven him from all hopes of sleep. "I'll make sure You-Know-Who stays dead, and I'll give him a nice kick if he tries to get in here."

"You do that, Ron." Harry said, rolling onto his side, asleep before the words really had the chance to leave his mouth.

**Dennis **never really got to the Room of Requirement. He hid behind a tapestry and stunned Death Eaters as they went by. He was rather good, too. Six or seven unconscious bodies piled at his feet.

And when Voldemort was killed he was still on the second floor in an all-out battle with Goyle. Goyle, who had been so vicious to him all year, who had tortured both him and his brother…Dennis wanted to kill him and settled for stunning him in close proximity to a window.

He didn't wait to see the body toppling to the ground before he was off, skidding down the stairs in the direction of the enormous cheers. Colin, he had to see Colin, who would, of course, be talking of nothing else but documenting the occasion, and would whip his camera out from thin air.

For fifteen blissful minutes he was caught up in the tide of good cheer, in the screams of excitement. Voldemort was gone! Peace! Dennis forgot what the word meant, having lived for so long under the threat of Death Eater rule, but he knew that peace was better than what had been, better than war.

After people started dispersing, seeing to friends and relatives, going to spread the good news, Dennis started looking around for Colin. And looking.

"Oy, Dennis!" Hagrid called, his voice low and subdued, and Dennis went, happy to see his favorite teacher still on his feet. Dennis was swept up in a familiar bone-crunching hug and just hung on tight, happy for human contact as the emotions welled up inside him, creating a confused bubble that released themselves in savage sobs.

"I'm sorry, Den, I'm sorry," Hagrid kept saying, and Dennis didn't know why, not really, not until Hagrid let him down and he could see what lay just behind the great giant. Colin, looking much, much too young in death.

And Dennis cried harder, clinging to Hagrid as if the man were his life line and he was drowning in a sea of unhappiness.

**Draco** knew that this was the last time he would see his parents.

"We're going to prison." His mother had said without preamble as night flung itself into day with reckless abandon. "We're going to get a fair trial, because this new regime wants to prove itself, but we're going to prison."

"It'll be a fair sight better than the last year." Draco said, determined to be happy about this. He had never been a Death Eater, not really, and around his mother he didn't have to pretend. His mother, Draco often suspected, hated the Death Eaters and hated her evil sister more than anyone else in the world.

"You're not coming!" Narcissa hissed, pressing a bag of gold into his hands. "Tell your father goodbye, tell him that you love him, and give your dear mum a kiss, but you will take this gold, change your appearance, and leave this place."

"I won't abandon you, mother!" Draco proclaimed, wincing at the sounds of merriment around him. Didn't everyone know what a crisis he was in? "I'll stick by you and father!"

"Don't be silly, you're still a boy." His mother said, waving a hand dismissively. "You have so much to live for, my dear Draco, and so much capacity for change. You must change, darling, for in this new society it will be Potter's side…or perish."

"Potter," Draco scoffed, happy that there was at least one thing that remained the same. He still couldn't stand the thought of Potter. "I'd rather go to prison that be ruled by him."

"You could learn a thing or two from Potter, son." Narcissa Malfoy said, patting Draco's cheek. It was the last thing she ever said to her son.

**Luna** sat in the room with Ginny, who was crying. Luna thought it was probably for her brother, one of those two who Luna knew were twins but always mixed up anyway. Anyway, the tears were okay. Luna felt like crying, too, but out of happiness. It was all over, and most of them had come out alive.

It was all over, and Luna was going to cry, because she had no idea what would happen in the future, but it damn well had to be better than the past.

**.***.**

**We can't leave Harry well enough alone, and the movie made us remember that there is this whole 19 years that hasn't been written yet. We can't promise you 19 years, but we do promise closure. Because we need closure with this story (I don't know about ya'll, bu me and Mike started reading this when we were 6 years old.) It's a part of us. It's the books that defined a generation. _Our_ generation. And we need there to be an ending.**

**So, for Harry, for the books, for us...please reiview.**


	2. Mornings and Mournings

_"It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more." **Dumbledore**_

**Mornings and Mournings**

**Charlie** and Percy went over to the Burrow first. Their mother and father had gone to Muriel's. They said it was for sleep, but every Weasley knew that there would be no sleep, not tonight, not for a while.

They apparated, by unspoken agreement, on the very outskirts of Ottery St. Catchpole and walked the rest of the way. Every once and a while they'd pas a wizarding family breaking out the wine and rolling back the rugs. Charlie had forgotten that for most of the wizarding world this was a day of celebration, a day to remember.

"D'you think George is okay?" Percy asked, and Charlie glanced at him, this turncoat who had crawled over to the Ministry, and saw the man as a younger brother, scared and looking for advice, for a direction.

"I dunno if George will ever be okay," Charlie sighed, wishing for Bill. But Bill had gone with Kingsley back over to the Minstry to try to start sorting things out, leaving Charlie as the oldest of the Weasley children, leaving Charlie in charge. "But their friend – Lee, right? – I don't think he'll let George do anything stupid."

The words hung in the air between the two brothers for a second before Percy really had a chance to process them. Once he did, he stopped dead in his tracks and clutched Bill's sleeve. "You don't think…not George…"

"What would you do, Perce?" Charlie said, suddenly angry at Percy because he was there, because Charlie felt like he needed someone to be angry at and the people who had caused the death of his brother were already dead themselves. "Fred is gone. Think about it…do you even remember a time when you were with George without Fred?"

For in all of Charlie's memories, they were always a pair, always. Where Charlie might go on an excursion or join a sports team or take a class without even consulting his brothers, Fred and George moved so seamlessly as a pair that Charlie couldn't even imagine George in the singular sense.

Percy didn't answer him, but kicked up his pace. They would get to the Burrow, and George would still be alive. He had to be, because Percy didn't think his heart could splinter into any more pieces.

**Dean** sat next to Seamus in the Great Hall. They hadn't gone to bed yet. They'd spent their evening cataloguing the dead.

Dean knew he was lucky, so, so lucky, because Seamus and Luna were still alive, and at the moment they were all he could think of, but the dead…the dead were piling up on the side of the room, mostly kids Dean had known for years, brave kids with families and dreams and guts…

He'd stumbled upon Oliver Wood, big, imposing Oliver Wood who Dean had so admired n school, sobbing helplessly over the body of Colin Creevey. And Angelina Johnson and Alicia Spinnet were gathered around the body of Katie Bell. And there were more, so many more, but Dean bypassed them all.

"Hey, Seamus." He said, sitting next to his friend. Seamus looked awful, his face so swollen that if it hadn't been for the huge hug that Dean had been greeted with in the Room of Requirement, Dean wasn't entirely sure he would have recognized him. "So…what have you been doing all year?"

Dean's story had taken about five sentences to get out. Though the long months of camping hadn't been a picnic, and Ted Tonk's death had hit him pretty hard, there was little he could say about dreariness and hunger that could be adequately conveyed in words. Some things to just had to be experienced.

Seamus looked at him from over his goblet of pumpkin juice and got up abruptly. "Fancy a walk, Dean?"

"Of course," Dean said, eager to get out of this hall of dead things. "Coming, Luna?" for Dean had gotten to the point where he invited Luna everywhere. For three months they'd been together, since Malfoy Manor and Shell Cottage, and Dean was so used to the wildly eccentric, optimistic (and, really, quite beautiful) girl beside him.

So the three went for a walk around Hogwarts grounds and Seamus told a story of blood status and torture. "It didn't matter what house they were in, Pure Bloods were the top. I think that's why the Carrows were so furious Neville was the leader of the resistance. Still, they'd just, you know, use _crucio _on him. Mostly, if they wanted to get to Nev they'd take one of the younger kids…or me."

Seamus didn't talk much about the detentions, though Dean would get the full story out in bits and pieces over drinks much later on. He only said something about chains, about _sectumsempra_, about not being kept in the dungeons for one night, two.

"Still," Seamus said, looking over the blood-soaked grounds. "It turned out all right, in the end."

Well, perhaps so, but Dean wished that people didn't have to bloody die for them to reach this conclusion.

**Hermione **had slept with Ginny the night before. Both had sobbed themselves to sleep, too exhausted to really know why they were crying. In the morning, they woke up to a second wave of battle.

For one terrifying instant, Hermione almost understood why Voldemort had done what he'd done. The only way to truly win against grief, she realized, was by not really loving anyone at all.

**Tom** was listening to the Muggle radio stations when the young man walked into his bar. He was thin, too thin, with tan skin and dark, wavy hair and sad, sad green eyes. He looked so familiar, like a name that was on the tip of the tongue and would always remain there.

"Hello," The man said, his voice low and measured. Cultured. Educated. Tom picked up on things like that in words. Being a barman had taught him something. "I was wondering…I was wondering if there was any room for some help around here? I'll work hard and dirt cheap if you let me have one of the smaller rooms up there." The boy jerked his head towards the dingy staircase.

Tom hadn't had help in years and years and his arthritis had started kicking in somewhere around the time of the First War. Now, it was as if someone had granted wishes he hadn't even known he'd made in the forms of a scrawny, untested teenager.

But the boy looked earnest, and Tom had a sneaking suspicion, fueled by the awful coverage over the radio, that he had nowhere else to go. Lots of homes had been blown up, lots of families torn apart.

"You had school?"

"Enough."

"Know how to treat customers okay?"

"Sure."

"Can you keep your head if people are hollerin' at you from all sides?"

A lip curled, and the name that was on the tip of Tom's tongue almost leapt off of it. Almost. "Of course."

"And what's your name?"

The teen paused for a second, and Tom could see something secret happening behind the heavy, half-lidded eyes. Still, the answer came before too long. "Ben," the dark man said, "Just Ben."

"Well, Just Ben." The old barman said, reaching out a wrinkled old hand. "Just Tom has just hired you. You can start right now."

And so, on the day when wizards everywhere were trying to rebuild their old lives, Draco Malfoy had gone out and gotten himself a new one.

**.***.**

**So we were lucky enough to see Harry twice and found it just as poignant the second time around. We personally think 7 is hte best movie, but what about ya'll? It certainly made us interested in writing about Harry again.**

**This is a long story, by the way, so we'll update once every week/two weeks. Should be fun, no?**

**Keep reviewing, we'll keep updating. **


	3. Fred

_"You haven't got a letter on yours," George observed. "I suppose she thinks you don't forget your name. But we're not stupid - we know we're called Gred and Forge." **The Sorcerer's Stone**_

**Fred**

**Ron** cried. He couldn't help it, and once he started he couldn't stop. They were at the Burrow once again, and Harry was sharing the room and looking at him worriedly, scooting across the bed so their knees were touching.

"Mate, you can't do this…" The Boy Who Lived (Twice) was saying, and Ron barely had time to register the tears behind Harry's glasses between his own thick sobs. "Mate, I have so many funerals…"

"But _Fred_."

"Fred…" And Harry was crying, too. Thick, hiccupping wretches that wouldn't have, couldn't have come when crisis was near and real but now that Voldemort was gone they could mourn properly, and Ron couldn't think of a person to mourn more than Fred.

He'd already decided to stay around home all summer, to go to the shop with George, to help pick up the pieces of his family, of the remaining twin. He thought himself closest to his next oldest brothers, the pair who had haphazardly cared for him through Hogwarts, the two who were so fundamentally important to his life and yet…yet separate.

And Ron suddenly, clearly remembered a time when he was very, very little, perhaps eight, perhaps nine, for the twins were about to be off to Hogwarts and were soaring around the Quidditch field on their second hand brooms. Ron had flounced into the kitchen, indignant in the way only the very small could be, and proclaimed that he didn't like the twins anymore. "They never let me play with them!"

Which left Mrs. Weasley to explain to her youngest son the ways of twins. "They are different from your other brothers," She fumbled, "They were born together, dearie, and they still haven't yet learned to live apart." But even she had been worried, for she knew of other twins who were not like her boys, her boys which were really one soul separated into two bodies, each integral to the other's being.

There were other times, too, times that made themselves known throughout Ron's childhood that these two, these twins, were a whole other class of being that existed only for and in each other.

And so when Ron and Harry cried in the upstairs bedroom of a house that was full to capacity of the grieving and the lost, they weren't just crying for the twin that died, they were crying, too, for the twin that lived.

**Percy** was the first to suggest they reopen Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.

This was…oh, perhaps three days after the funeral and they were all still at the Burrow, which had become a sort of headquarters for those in-between. Families who were trying to find their missing members congregated there, and it was a triage center for those who didn't entirely trust St. Mungo's. Every Weasley could be found there at some point of the day, and George just never seemed to leave.

"Don't you have a shop?" Percy asked shortly and without preamble. Lee, who seemed to have taken Fred's place at George's hip, glared at him.

"He just lost his brother, Perce, have a heart."

"I lost my brother, too!" Percy snapped, then winced because he knew it wasn't the same. Lee and Harry were both closer and better brothers to the twins than he had been, and, anyway, his pain wasn't comparable to George's. But he did believe that there was no use in moping around the house.

"The shop's ruined." George muttered into the floor. "The Death Eaters gutted it when we fled. Everything's gone. Everything that we didn't store away…dozens of items that have to be replaced."

"Then do it!" Percy said, gesticulating wildly. "Do it, George! Do something other than sit here and look at Fred's wand!"

George glared up at Percy, and for the first time Percy saw real anger in one of the twin's glares (except they weren't the twins anymore, huh?) He'd never really thought of the twins as having emotions as deep or as real as other people, because they were always laughing, smiling, cracking jokes even when madness and sadness would cut anybody else to the quick.

But something must have clicked in George, because later that day he and Lee went to take a look at the Diagon Alley shop. The next day, Bill and Charlie and Ron and Harry and Hermione and Dean and Seamus and Luna and Arthur and just about everyone with a wand went down to help them rebuild, because at least it was something productive that they could do with their hands and their time.

And Percy liked to think he had a little bit of a hand in that.

**George** didn't know what to do with himself.

He used to orient himself around his twin. They played off each other, knew the punch lines of each other's jokes, knew exactly what the other was thinking or doing or was going to do. Fred had been his best friend, brother, and confidant. Gred and Forge. They were supposed to be around forever.

And, yes, there had been those terrible days right after the Battle and the Fall of Voldemort and the Death that George had thought about killing himself. Fred was already dead, and to him that seemed infinitely better than living. He couldn't think of himself in the singular sense, not after twenty years of plurality. So he'd tried to off himself, tried…

But Lee, Lee, who had braved the strange bonds of twinhood, Lee, the pragmatic one, the realistic one, the best friend any set of twins could ever ask for…it was Lee who saved him that night, Lee who came to the rescue.

"You can't, George!" Lee had said, shaking him. Hard. "You can't leave! What about me, huh? What about me?"

And it was for Lee, not for one of his remaining brothers, not for his mother or father or sister, that George remained around. Because it was Lee who knew him (them) best, who had stuck with them through seven years. It was Lee, along with only Ron and, strangely, Harry, who could tell them apart even before the ear. Always.

So George stuck around, but he no longer had a goal. Jokes were not funny anymore, not at all. And company, which he used to live for (for the twins were social animals, you couldn't deny them that) was no longer appealing in the least. He wanted to be alone. He wanted to wallow, because no one in the world could feel as he did right now. Others had lost people, sure. Brothers, even. But twinhood…it was inexplicable to those who don't have a twin, and there had been times, many times over the years, when George would feel a brief pang of sorrow for all those who had to go through life twin-less, for what unhappy creatures they must be.

And now he had joined their ranks.

And he was unhappy.

**Ben** was the one who gave George the portrait. Ben, who used to be Draco but now was Ben, just Ben.

But he couldn't entirely change overnight, and when a patron in the bar mentioned that it was a right shame that the joke shop at the end of Diagon Alley had closed, Ben's smirk came about a moment before he remembered he wasn't supposed to be happy about that anymore.

"Really? Why? I thought it was really popular." Ben wiped a stain from the bar, deftly moved the rag to an empty pitcher. He'd never cleaned in his life, but now he felt the repetitive, easy motions to be soothing.

"Didn't you hear, lad? One of those boys is dead. I went in there once, you know, to pick up somethin' for me niece. They were laughin' the whole time, insisted I try the thing before I left. Interestin' blokes…good men, too, if I'm any judge of character."

"A lot of good men died." Ben said, thinking of Professor Snape for a second before he threw the thought out. He wouldn't think of his old mentor, the only man who had ever shown him any real kindness. Not now.

"Yeah, well, those Weasleys are among the best of them. There's quite a few running about. Finest quality." The man took one last swig of butterbeer and threw a Galleon on the counter, never mind that the drink only cost six Sickles. "Here's hopin' the future's better, huh?"

"Right." Ben said, looking through the coin, past it. And suddenly he needed to see people from school again. Now that he was no longer Draco-freakin'-Malfoy, would they hate him?

The easiest way to get into that inner sanctum of Weasley, Ben decided, would be to give them something. A gift. (And don't ask why Ben was so intent on meeting these Weasleys. He didn't know himself, except maybe it was because they had each other and he now had nothing at all) It took some doing to get the portrait out of Malfoy Manor, since the place was crawling with Ministry people, but he could cast a pretty decent Dissolusionment charm now and snuck in at night, when everything was quiet.

It was a simple portrait of Hogwarts. It barely moved, but it had always been Draco's favorite picture in the house. It seemed to crackle with magic, with energy, and he would spend hours as a child watching the wind beat through the trees, watching tiny, tiny people zoom around the Quidditch Pitch.

So it was armed with a portrait and no small amount of curiosity that Ben went to go see the people he'd detested for seven years.

**Fred **found Heaven to be quite boring.

He was lonely, though it wasn't for lack of people. He had stumbled into Heaven and run straight into Lupin, surrounded by young men who were no older than himself. Lupin seemed to much younger, too, and had swung an arm out to his friends.

"Sirius!" Fred gasped, whirling, "So I'm…I'm…"

"I'm sorry, kid." Sirius said gravely, putting a heavy hand on Fred's shoulder. "But it's not that bad. We're winning."

Fred didn't know how Sirius knew that, he only know that he kept spinning on the spot, looking around in every direction.

"He's not here." Lupin said quietly, peering at Fred in that intense way the ex-Professor had. "Your brother. He isn't here."

Fred flushed, running a distracted, distress hand through his signature crop of hair. "I'm a terrible person, aren't I Professor? That I want him here."

"Nah," the other man said, and Fred knew that this had to be James. Everyone was right – Harry looked just like his father. "I've heard a lot about you, kid. Dumbledore keeps saying that you and your brother are trying to be the next Marauders. Found our map, huh?"

"Yeah." Fred said, still breathing hard.

James looked at him, then stuck his hand out. "Please to meet you…err…which twin are you?"

He'd been accepted readily enough into the fold of the Marauders. Lily and Tonks and, strangely, Snape hung around often, and Fred sometimes laughed and sometimes smiled but more often brooded, longing for the company of his brother, for Lee, for their Diagon Alley shop they'd spent a lifetime working for.

So he tried to find a way out. This was no quest for Horcruxes or even Hallows. He wasn't trying to beat death, just trick it. Pull a prank, as he had every day of his life. He'd slip out the door as the old Marauders talked over old exploits and new adventures and wander through the strange Heaven, a makeshift world where things happened or didn't happen. It could be paradise. If Fred had his friends, as James and Sirius and Lupin had each other, he could be happy forever.

Except he wasn't ready yet, he wasn't ready for this. Which is why when he found the painting, found that if he looked through it he could see the shop he loved so dearly, he stepped into it without a second thought.

And so it was Fred Weasley, not Dumbledore or Grindlewald or Voldemort, who beat death first.

**.***.**

**We're identical twins, in case anyone out there didn't know. We connect on a very personal level with these twins and have spent quite a bit of time pondering between us what would happen if the other dies. Can you all imagine? Sometimes, we don't think people who are twinless really can. Which is why we always think that Fred would do anything, anything, to get back to his brother.**

**Anyways, please review.**


	4. Summer

_"Time is making fools of us again." **Dumbledore**_

**Summer **

**Luna** was falling into some serious love.

The only problem is, it was with two guys.

She'd never liked books or movies or fairy tales. She preferred _doing_ things to listening about them. She would rather collect flowers or paint or help her father or go fishing or walk barefoot or search for something no one had ever seen.

But she had heard stories, when she was little, when her mother used to read to her, and they had usually been about girls. Young girls who had two boys pining after her, and Luna would think in an empty, eight-year-old way, that _she_ should be so lucky as to have two stand-up guys wooing her.

Well, now she had them. And now she knew why there were epics written about love triangles.

**Ron** opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. "You're pregnant?"

Hermione nodded shyly, one hand over her stomach in an extremely protective way. She was biting her bottom lip. "Yes, Ron, that's the third time you've asked. I'd double and triple checked it." She became suddenly stern, cold, furious, "And if you ask whether it's yours Ronald Weasley, I will just scream."

"No! I wasn't going to say that!" Ron said, his ears turning green. His hand, fiddling and twisting in his pocket, accidently toggled against the deluminator. He could hear Hermione sigh in the darkness for the split second before he turned the lights back on.

"So," He said, finding her suddenly too hard to look at in the sudden brightness and averting his eyes. "So," he said again, clearing his throat, "What do you want to do?"

"I'm going to keep the baby." Hermione said firmly, chin jutting out defiantly as if daring Ron to argue.

He waved that point away. "Of course, and Bill will be just thrilled that his youngest brother is having a kid before him. At least I get to be first in something. No, you're keeping that baby, it's the first grandkid for my parents. What I meant it do you want to get married now or next summer? I was thinking we were going to wait until we finished Hogwarts – we are going back next year, right?"

Hermione smiled so broadly her cheeks hurt. "You're not freaking out."

"About a baby? Hermione, I can do family stuff pretty well. After Voldemort a baby's a piece of cake." He drew her close to him. "And I love you so much. This was going to happen eventually."

"I was thinking after marriage." Hermione muttered into his sweater.

"Weddings are mostly for fun in the Wizarding World, 'Mione. Well, and for the gifts. If you told my family today that you were pregnant mom would probably insist we get married that way we have some necessities before the baby comes." He looked at her closely. "So do you want me to propose right now?"

"Right now?" She thought about it. There was no doubt in her mind that she and Ron would get married, whether next week or next year. There was no doubt that she would have more children with him and spend the rest of her life with him. Why rush? "Let's keep this to ourselves for a little bit. Let us have this summer."

**Dean **tripped over his love, and didn't know it until it was right in front of him.

He and Luna and Seamus had cleared out after the war. Luna's dad was back in the publishing business, but he had practically forced Luna out the door. "Go," he's said, sounding lucid for once, "Go and do something more important than what an old man has accomplished in a lifetime."

So Luna had gone with him (Dean had seen his mother and sisters one last time at the beginning of summer, but they didn't understand the Wizarding world and he didn't want to drag them into it) and Seamus to London, where they got a flat and lived in harmony and got along well enough.

Dean thought that the whole summer would be horrible (and parts of it were. The nightmares, the funerals, the tears…) but it was actually…well, it might be inappropriate to call it the best summer of his life, but that's certainly what it felt like.

There was nothing for them to do. There was no war to worry about, no battles with the possibility of death (or, worse, the possibilities of leading your friends to death) looming on the horizon. There was just time for them to find themselves, to heal, to relax…to fall in love.

The only problem is, Seamus was also in love with Luna. Dean could see it in his smile, the in the way he adjusted himself to the girl. One day there would be a decision made. One day, one of their hearts would be broken.

But for now they were content to live, the three of them, and be children in this glorious summer, the most beautiful and temperate in all their lives.

**George **started crying when he saw the picture.

Ben had brought it in a week before, one hand scratching his neck as he held it out, a peace offering, a welcoming gift. "I found this while I was cleaning out one of the older rooms…thought it would be to your taste." A beautiful picture of Diagon Alley as it had been a year ago, the point of view changing ever so slightly every few minutes. The focal point of the painting always remained the same though, and George found himself smiling a true smile when he saw Weasley Wizard Wheezes in miniature.

He thanked the bartender and offered him something in return for the painting: money or products. In the end, he extended his friendship, something he didn't do often but did then, impulsively, because there was something naggingly familiar about this Ben character. When Ben accepted his offer to be friends both were smiling, happy with the deal.

Well, a week later Fred bullied his way into the painting. A week later, Fred had worked his way back from the dead to rejoin his twin and the land of the living. A week later, George found himself crying in front of his stunned youngest brother as he stood in front of the painting, staring at Fred.

There weren't words to describe what he felt then. Happiness isn't right. It was more like relief: relief that he wouldn't have to face life alone. Relief that he could stop moping and mourning. Relief in this tangible proof that everything could turn out alright in the end.

"It's alright, George." Fred said, three inches tall and unable to hold his twin but very much alive. He couldn't explain, then or later, how he'd escaped death when more learned wizards couldn't. He would only shrug and say that perhaps he wanted it more. No one in the world was more _alive_ than the Weasley twins. No one in the world deserved or loved life more. Perhaps he just wasn't ready for death.

Perhaps death wasn't ready for him.

**Harry** had taken up residence at Grimwald Place with Ron, Hermione, and whoever needed a room for the night. Right then, though, everyone was out. Or was supposed to be.

Ron apparated directly into the kitchen where Harry was reading one the Defense books Lupin and Sirius had given to him a lifetime ago. Harry's wand was up before he even registered his best friend and Ron batted it away. "You're going to take someone's eye out like that, Har. Pay attention, will you? And don't read those books alone at night. They make you paranoid."

Something about Ron's voice, the slight slur to his words, made Harry look up. "George take you drinking again?" Ever since Fred's miraculous return George had gone to the Leaky Cauldron every night, usually with Lee and at least two or three of his brothers, celebrating with Ben the bartender and anyone else who wanted some free beer.

"Wasn't George," Ron said, collapsing in the chair. His eyes were red, but not from drink. It was as if he'd been crying.

"Ron…" Harry said, his voice low and unsure. The world was just starting to heal after the battles, and sometimes Harry found that the hardest things to fix were the things closest to you. Yours friends. "Ron, what's wrong?"

"Hermione," Ron said, the word almost a sob as he leaned into the table. "She lost the baby."

Harry had been the only one to know about the baby. There was very, very little Ron kept from Harry about anything, and red-head's romance with Hermione was of great interest to the savior of the Wizarding World.

"No!" Harry said, feeling a little bit of his heart break. His thoughts flashed suddenly, strangely, to Teddy Lupin, the boy who was his godson, the one who'd seen mere hours ago, the boy he was coming to quickly love, and then back to Ron's plight. The baby – Ron's _child_ – that hadn't had a chance to live. "Is Hermione alright? She's not hurt?"

"I left her with Fleur and Ginny and Loony. They're at Shell Cottage. We were just at Bill's for a cup of tea, you know, and then she started having pains….Bill went for a doctor and Charlie was there. He's almost a medic, Har, he knows his stuff. 'Mione's okay, thank God, but the baby…she lost the baby."

Red-rimmed eyes met Harry's pure green ones and Harry didn't think he'd ever seen someone look more lost in his life. "She lost the baby."

**.***.**

**Poor 'Mione. We love the girl. She's one of the only female characters in literature (other than Scarlet O'Hara and Elizabeth Bennet) that we can actually respect. Poor girl.**

**Anyway, please review.**


	5. Hogwarts

_"It is our choices who show who we are, far more than our abilities."**Dumbledore**_

**Hogwarts**

**Harry** found it hard to adjust to Hogwarts this year. After being on his own, on the run, and trying to save the Wizarding World, he found preparing for exams to be excruciatingly boring.

Some teachers were better than others. McGonagall was juggling being Headmistress and Transfiguration teacher supremely well and took no excuses. "Mr. Potter," She would say, almost rolling her eyes as she looked at him. "How you could defeat the Dark Lord and still be unable to make furniture appear out of thin air is beyond me." And the room would laugh and relax and they were just students again.

Slughorn let him do about anything. Snape (who Harry no longer hated, not even a little bit, though he still thought the Professor could have been less of a scumbag to him for his first few years of Hogwarts) had left him his copy of _Advanced Potion Making_, and Potions was once again a breeze. Still, the simple of action of mixing ingredients and regulating temperatures was quietly comforting.

One of the strangest adjustments was Ron. Ron, who was no longer following Harry into battle, no matter what Harry said.

"Do you really want to work at the joke shop, Ron?" Harry asked one day after Quidditch practice (he'd missed Quidditch, and going back to games and practices was something the was more therapeutic for him than any of Hermione's lectures over the terrible summer.) "I mean, I know you're trying to help out the twins…"

"I like it, Harry." Ron said, shrugging off his Keeper pads and pulling on a worn Weasley sweater. "I like working with Fred and George. They're so smart, I swear I learned more in a month with them than I ever will in Flitwick's class. I'm learning how to make up my own spells and stuff, and, I dunno…"

"What?" Harry asked, curious. Ron had professed an interest in being an Auror even before Harry had said his dream out loud, and this sudden change of heart was difficult for Harry to understand.

"It's just that I think I've had enough of battles, Harry." He said, "You've always been loads better at spells than me, and I think you like it. Don't that that the wrong way, Har, it's just that it makes you excited, being in battles. It just makes me scared, and I always think about the wrong thing…I can't be an Auror with Hermione waiting at home, Harry, I just can't."

"You don't want to leave her a widow." Harry mused, thinking this over. Ron was right – fighting for his life made Harry feel alive, and lately Ginny had expressed her own interest in the job. With her fighting next to him, Harry was sure he could keep her and himself safe. "But it's loads better than it was, Ron. Since Voldemort died it's been pretty quiet."

"There'll be someone else." Ron said, hanging up his Quidditch robes and lingering in the doorway for Harry. "There's crazy people in this world, Harry. Voldemort only got a few of them."

So they spent their last year at Hogwarts taking the same classes and doing the same things. Harry was dating Ginny and was sure he was going to marry her. Ron and Hermione were as good as married (Seamus liked to point out that they argues like an old married couple.) The four of them were going to be together for the rest of their lives.

But for the first time Ron wasn't following Harry's lead, and Harry found himself doubting his own path without his best friend at his side.

**Dennis** liked to go down to Hagrid's whenever he had the chance.

The school was crowded. Many people had come back to repeat their seventh year, and the Gryffindor Common Room especially was full to bursting. Still, Dennis was glad to be at Hogwarts. Here he could always find somebody who had lost a friend, a lover, a brother. Here, he wasn't alone in his grief.

But the Groundskeeper helped him forget about Colin entirely. And Dennis found that he was _good_ at working with animals. He had a knack for knowing what was wrong with them and a skill with treating them. Hagrid said he had Healing Hands. "'S what old Ogg used to say to me. He taught me ta be Groundskeeper, ya see. 'Twas Ogg that gave me dis job."

And Hagrid would peer down his bushy eyebrows at Dennis and grumble something to himself, and Dennis would pretend he didn't hear and quietly go about treating the animal he was holding, blushing a little with the pleasure of having someone who was just his. Oh, the Golden Trio came to see Hagrid, too, but it was Dennis who found himself loving the old giant like a father.

So in a world where his favorite person in the world – Colin – was dead, and his mother didn't want to see him, Dennis found himself laughing in a small, warm cottage with an old half-giant every night. And he found that grief may be unstoppable but that sadness was a choice.

**Ginny **liked having Harry around.

She liked having him by her side while she studied for Charms and she liked having him pull her hair as he flew by during Quidditch practice and she liked that he held her hand between classes and kissed her and touched her shoulder and basically told the world that she was _his_.

She just didn't know if she _loved_ all that.

Sometimes it seemed like she and Harry were pre-ordained. She'd had a crush on him ever since before the Chamber of Secrets, and then he'd saved her life and the crush had intensified to all-out puppy love. Ron and Hermione were so close by then, arguing back and forth, with Ron completely unaware that he was in love with her, and Harry never seemed attached to anyone, not even Cho, really. As if he was waiting for her.

And sometimes Ginny thought that maybe it was all happening too fast. Like, did Harry love her because she was smart, funny, brave Ginny Weasley or because she was Ginny Weasley, Ron's kid sister and she was _there_? Sometimes Ginny wasn't so sure.

And sometime in between the hair-pulling and kissing and touching, she would have to talk to Harry about it, about what they were going to do for the rest of their lives. Because Ginny liked Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived (twice), the savior of the Wizarding world.

But she was seventeen years old. Were you supposed to know who you were in love with when you are seventeen years old?

**Luna** was glad to have Ginny as her best friend, because they were both confused about love.

"So are you going out with Seamus?" Ginny asked her one day. They were on the edge of the lake having a picnic with Hermione, just the girls.

"I thought you were going out with Dean." Hermione said, glancing up from her book long enough to raise a single eyebrow.

"Neither." Luna said, laying on her stomach so she could pick the late daffodils growing along the lake's edge. She rolled over on her back, flower in hand. "I can't figure out which one I like more. I don't think it's possible for me to choose between them."

"I don't envy you." Hermione said shrewdly. "I don't think I could choose between best friends."

Ginny slipped a daisy chain around Luna's head and smiled at her friend when she looked up. It was at times like this that Luna thought Ginny was the only person in the world who really understood her.

"You don't have to pick right now." Ginny said quietly. "Life isn't supposed to be as serious as it has been for the last couple of years. There's no war. There's no pressing need to claim the one you love." Now Hermione was looking at the pair of them, eyebrows raised, but of course Hermione didn't count at all. Hermione was already quite content with her husband-to-be. But she was older, too, and sometimes a year did make a heck of a lot of difference. Sometimes a year made all the difference in the world.

"You don't have to pick right now." Ginny said again, looking at Hermione hard, daring her to say something, and Hermione went back to her book, trying not think about her dark-haired best friend, the one who was so sure that Ginny Weasley was ready to settle down with him right now for the rest of their lives.

**.***.**

**Strange to think that suddenly relationships would be their biggest issue, but if there's one thing that humans are great at it's adaptation. Transitioning is never as hard as one expects it to be...**

**Anyways, please review.**


	6. Nightmares

_"It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live."**Dumbledore**_

**Nightmares**

**Seamus** woke them all up for the first two weeks with his nightmares. The first night Harry almost cursed him out of his bed. The second Ron shook Dean's shoulder and pointed before rolling back over to sleep. By the fifth time…well, who were they kidding, they weren't getting much sleep anyway. It turned into a kind of _party_.

"You guys can't imagine." Seamus said, sandwiched between Neville and Dean, eyes wide as he took another truffle from the box set in the middle of their circle. "I mean, I know you were hunting Hor-whatsis and Dean, you were on the run…"

"But it was crazy." Neville said, shaking his head. "Me, Ginny, Luna, and Shay kind of took over the DA, you know, 'cept we all had something Seamus didn't."

"Pure blood." Ron spat, a murderous look marring his normally easy-going features. "Ginny said blood status was everything last year."

"Everything. Me and Gin, we were in charge, you know? But Shay was the scapegoat."

"'M only half-blood, maybe not even that." Seamus said, shrugging. "Didn't matter before a couple years ago, did it? Not to anyone except the Slytherins. And then last year a little blood was the difference between being _crucio_'d like Neville – which wasn't a picnic either, Nev, I know."

"Better than being tortured." Neville said, voice shaking with rage that he never really got to spend the year before. "Better than being locked in a dungeon for days and being whipped and cursed and _sectumsempra_'d."

Dean winced and rubbed the back of Seamus's neck, one of the few places without residual scars (those scars would stay with the Irish boy for the rest of his life). Harry gaped at Neville. "It was that bad?"

"Only for me, really." Seamus said quickly, elbowing Neville. He didn't like having his personal business out in the open, didn't feel like he should be complaining in front of Harry Potter, who had, as everyone knew, actually _died_ in the battle. "Most of the other half-bloods they could keep in check...like the Creeveys. It was easy, they'd just threaten Dennis or…or Colin." He choked a little on the name. Man, but he'd grown to love that kid over the last year. But he hurried on, "They couldn't hurt me like that. My mum left the country last summer. I don't have any other family."

They sat in silence for a little while, and Harry thought that maybe they were all thinking of their families. Now it was he, Neville, and Seamus who were as good as orphans. Harry reflected that the war had created a lot of orphans, like his godson Teddy.

"You know," Harry said after a while, "I'm sure Madame Pomfrey has a potion for dreamless sleep…I remember taking it, once." Under what circumstances he couldn't remember. Was that after third year and the dementors? After fourth year, when Voldemort came back? After fifth year, and the debacle at the Ministry? Everything was beginning to blur together, and what had once been distinct, blood-pounding battles were just becoming one hazy picture that he was beginning to think of as his childhood.

**George **had nightmares about the Battle a lot.

You know those kind, where you are trying to get somewhere and things keep getting in the way. Really important things, like Lee locked in a battle with a Death Eater and losing, like Charlie with his arm and collar bone obviously shattered, trying to crawl away from an acromentula, like Ginny running down the stairs with her hair on fire or Tonks, holding Teddy for some bizarre reason and the baby was screaming, and screaming, and screaming…

And it was really his own screams. His own panic as he realized that he would never, could never get to his brother in time. His favorite brother, his twin brother, his real other half. He _felt_ it when Fred died. In the place right above his navel, in his bones, in his soul, he _felt_ Fred leave him. And he'd wanted to die.

But that was already a story, one that George didn't want to go back to. And now whenever he had those nightmares (Harry tumbling off a balcony, Angelina caught with a green curse to the chest, Ron staring at him with large, surprised blue eyes as he clutched his hands over a lethal chest wound…) he would wake up and turn to the portrait that hung in his bedroom. He had portraits everywhere now, running space for his favorite person in the world.

Fred would sense him waking up (it's something twins did often. Like George said, they just_ knew _things about each other) and wake up himself in his own portrait world. "Hey Georgie, you okay?"

Fred couldn't hold him, or pat his arm, or shake his hand, or hug him, but he was undeniably there.

"Yeah, bro." George would say, twitching a smile. "I'm fine."

And after that, he was.

**Fleur** had never had nightmares before she got pregnant for the first time.

Then they came in droves, steeling her sleep and her breath until she woke up and rolled over, until she could bury her face in Bill's comforting warmth and he'd put a huge arm around her shoulders and kiss her and murmur soft words, until she started sobbing, clutching the coverlet to her lips and shaking her head, unable to find the words in English to describe her horrible dream.

Because in her nightmares she was always looking, searching, running down long corridors and throwing open doors until she finally found her Bill, her husband, the only man she'd ever known who had loved her for her brains and her heart and not for her beauty.

Even right after the attack, before they were married, Fleur would never dream of leaving Bill. How could she leave someone because of his appearance when Bill loved her in spite of her looks?

But those nightmares…when Fleur flung open the door and stumbled upon Bill, one hand on her still-mostly-flat stomach and she saw him as a monster, as a werewolf Lupin had always promised her Bill wouldn't become…

He still might, though. Sometimes his emotions, his movements, were more animal than man. And on those nights when Fleur woke up from the nightmares, pressing herself against her husband, she would do it because she was suddenly terrified at the prospect of being terrified of William Weasley.

**Neville** had nightmares very similar to Seamus's, and yet so fundamentally different.

Their _other_ seventh year of Hogwarts, the one that had happened simultaneously with Harry finding the Horcruxes, the one that had happened with the Carrows and Snape, was impossible to describe to someone who hadn't been there. The DA was formed almost on the train, and Neville found himself suddenly thrust into a position of leadership, a position he'd never asked for and, once he had it, found he couldn't force on someone else.

He'd told Harry that he hadn't been hurt, not like Seamus, and that was true. He was pure blood and that had mattered so damn much the year before. But his nightmares were of a different sort, a darker, scarier sort. Physical pain was in many ways easier, much easier, to deal with than emotional pain.

For he had been the leader of that little group. The guy everyone looked to for what they were going to do next. The renegades had been made up of kids, just kids, some as young as eleven years old, and very few old hands. The younger ones jumped on the cause, didn't quite know enough to stay out of it like the older ones who refused to join to protect their families.

And Neville had seen Michael Corner the day after he'd been beaten badly for the first time. He'd rescued Seamus from the dungeons after not seeing him for three days and found the Irish boy with more broken bones than not, more blood than skin, and when he tried to bring Shay to the hospital wing Madame Pomfrey had been in tears, but she couldn't treat him because the Carrows had threatened every student already under her care and she couldn't sacrifice their well-beings for one boy.

That night Neville had sat in their too-empty dorm room with Seamus and held his hand all night, convinced that he was going to die in his arms. Seamus was convinced that he was Dean, that he was his best friend, and Neville never corrected him. How could he do that to a dying man, someone he'd enlisted for his own cause and cajoled into fighting?

That was what Neville had nightmares about every night, Seamus's face, and all those other faces that he'd hurt by proxy. And it would be his cross to bear for the rest of his life.

**Harry** never had nightmares. Actually, it was the first time he could ever remember not having nightmares.

When he was little, very little, and still sleeping in a broom cupboard and wondering why the heck he did "freaky" things, he would dream about the green light, and a woman's red hair, and a deep man's voice telling someone to run, and he'd always wake up, heart pounding and on the verge of tears, because those voices should have been familiar and they weren't at all.

As he grew up…well, his nightmares were fueled by a healthy fear of Voldemort and losing the ones he loved. He'd fall asleep often and wake up after seeing Ginny with blood running down her face, or Hermione with a knife through her heart, or Ron's limp body hit on all sides by brilliant green curses.

Maybe he'd used up all his nightmares, all the fear and anxiety and terror that had been allotted him for a lifetime. Because in that year after the horrible battle, that year that he went back to Hogwarts and tried to remember that there was a life outside of defeating Voldemort, he never had a single nightmare, not one.

He finally, finally had dreams.

**.***.**

**This is for everyone out there who we are starting to think of as the "true' HP fans: the ones who waited with anticipation between books and read fanfiction and checked mugglenet every few days, hoping the release date had been pushed up. This is for that generation we grew up in, those kids who aged right along with Harry, who are still hoping that, maybe, we will get more books about him.**

**Anyway, please review.**

**Anyways, please review.**


	7. Quidditch

_"Bad news, Harry. I've just been to see Professor McGonagall about the Firebolt. She – er, got a bit shirty with me. Told me I'd got my priorities wrong. Seemed to think I cared more about winning the Cup than I do about staying alive. Just because I told her I didn't care if it threw you off, as long as you caught the Snitch first." **Oliver Wood**_

**Quidditch**

**Harry** took over the team again his seventh year, and it was the best season in anyone's memory.

Hermione and Dean remarked, quietly, that it was very much reminiscent of muggle football after World War II, when the young men came back older and stronger and the games in the seasons following the war were the most exciting in history. But the Quidditch players didn't care to listen to their history. They were too busy playing the game.

It was a Gryffindor dream team Oliver Wood would have been proud of (and, indeed, the former captain turned up at every match, sitting with the Weasley twins in the stands and booing the other team loudly.) Harry as Seeker, of course, and Ron, confident now, as Keeper, and camping and fighting for a year had made them both thin and quick. Beaters were harder to find – Harry had learned in September that Coote and Peakes had both been killed in the Battle of Hogwarts, but Michael Corner and Dennis Creevey, while not being the usual short, stout stereotype, had a friendship that carried over to the field and, as the Weasley twins pointed out, knowing and trusting the other Beater was the key to success. Ginny had recruited Rebecca Rose, from her own grade, and Brian Sterling, a large, laughing fifth year, to even out the oldest Gryffindor team in history.

It was a season that would be talked about for centuries.

Never before had the teams been so evenly matched. It got to the point where it was less about physical skill and more about strategy, something that Harry was good at coming up with, thanks to Oliver Wood's interminable number of lectures on the subject.

In the end, the Gryffindor team won the House Cup against Hufflepuff, but that wasn't really the point. Sometimes, when death isn't on the line, who wins in the end simply doesn't matter.

It took the span of a Quidditch season for Harry to remember that not everything is about great diabolical plans to take over the world. Some things were as simple and unimportant as the outcome of a game. And sometimes it was the most unimportant things that bring people together.

**Charlie **could still remember the first game he was captain in. He was a seventh-year, and after conducting try-outs he found that his own brothers were the best Beaters they'd seen in a very long time.

"Don't make me look bad, guys." He'd muttered to the second-years before taking the field. The twelve-year-old twins had nodded, grinning. Charlie looked at them and wondered if they ever got nervous. Probably not. They were too busy being excited. Sometimes (okay, oftentimes) Charlie envied them.

Once he was in the air, though...nothing mattered when you were in the air. A war could have broken out on the pitch below and Charlie wouldn't have noticed. He whizzed through the air, watching as his team put up easy points against Slytherin, and smiled to himself. Edging out Slytherin early, making it clear who would be the winner in this rivalry, would make him a legend.

They were a hundred and ten points ahead, and Charlie thought that two hours was quite long enough for this game. He didn't want to look cocky. So the next time he spotted the snitch he dove for it instead of leading the Slytherin Seeker on a wild goose-chase. He began his descent, wind in his ears, listening only to the cheering of the crowd…and then it stopped.

The difference was so sudden that Charlie pulled out of the dive, disoriented. The other Seeker streaked by him but somehow the fact that he caught the Snitch didn't matter. Because his younger brothers were on the field, one red head bent over the other, scarlet robes fluttering out like so much blood.

And in that instant, Charlie knew that, sometimes, all it took was a competition to make your heart stop in your chest. All it took was a game to make you realize there were more important things than games in the world, and a man with a lot of family may have a lot of love…but he also has that much more to lose.

**Hermione **watched Quidditch because Ron was playing, because Ron loved it. Because she loved Ron.

Here's something most people don't know about Ron: his love for Hermione is mature, adult, complex. Case in point: Ron would often come down to the library to sit with Hermione, taking with him the same four or five Quidditch books from off the shelves. Then he would sit in her favorite big armchair and she would lay in the crook of his arm and they would read.

Ron didn't like reading at all, even if it's about Quidditch, but he'd do it because he knew it was something Hermione loved, and he wanted to be where she was.

So Hermione went to the Quidditch games and cheered herself hoarse. It's just that simple.

**George** could still remember his first game.

He and Fred had been so excited. Only second-years, and they were on what was being called the best team in a good long while. Some people were cross when Charlie Weasley picked his two younger brothers to be on the team with him instead of older, more experienced players, but Charlie caught up with the two right after he announced his decision.

"Don't listen to those guys, little brothers." Charlie had said, clapping the twins on their backs, more to keep them from jumping on yet another bitter, taunting boy than it was to show camaraderie. "I wouldn't have picked you if you weren't good. Let's face it, I want to win more than I like the two of you."

They would have won, too, if not for that disastrous first game. It had started off so _well_, too. Lee, nearly bouncing in his excitement (and Lee _never_ bounced. He was the most laid back of the three, and said the twins did enough bouncing off the walls to make up for his lack of energy) had told the two that he would be commentating the match.

"Cool." Fred had said, smiling broadly, "You're probably the only one in the world who wouldn't mix me up with this ugly mug." He jerked a thumb at George, who swatted it away, rolling his eyes. Being identical down to their freckles got annoying sometimes, especially when people avoided calling him by name for fear of saying the wrong one.

"Don't know if I can do it with you two going eighty miles an hour, but I'll try." Lee promised, giving them a wave and wishing them good luck before racing up the stands to the commentator's booth.

Pulling his robes over his head in an eerily quiet, tense room, George looked over at Fred, who was swinging his Beater's bat lazily through the air. In another second, he had George's bat, and one of the spares they kept in the locker, and was juggling them easily. He caught George's eye and tossed one to him, then another, until they were juggling the three bats between them.

Charlie, used to his brother's antics had groaned, but tossed in an orange and a couple of the practice Quaffles they had laying around the changing rooms. The girls, wandering in from their section, started clapping, whooping, as the object got more and more and the twins got further and further apart.

They ended simultaneously. George could never adequately explain the sensation of being around his twin. They didn't communicate telepathically, or anything like that. He just…knew. He always knew what Fred was doing, like you always know what your arm or leg is doing. Because it's a part of you.

And so they passed their time before taking the field playing games to deal with their nerves, to make everyone else laugh, because that's what they _did._

Just before he mounted his broom to fly out onto the pitch, George looked at Fred. "Are you nervous, Fred?"

"Of course, George. If we screw this up Charlie's going to kill us." But he smiled his old, Fred smile, and George felt reassured. He wasn't doing this alone. He never did anything alone. Fred was always by his side, his best friend, his confidant, his other half. Fred was there for all his firsts…

Until he wasn't.

**Ginny **didn't know about anything anymore, and she took that out on Quidditch.

Sometimes, she felt like she was drowning in a sea of expectations. She was supposed to marry Harry, that much was obvious from her brother's laughing taunts and Harry's ever-more-frequent touches. She would be an idiot not to marry him - he was hte most eligable bachelor in the Wizarding World, for God's sake, and he had picked _her_.

Hermione said that she shouldn't do it if she didn't love Harry, that love was more important than fame (like she would know. She had both.) But Ginny did love Harry. She loved him so much that her whole body would ache at the sight of him, and her heart would still to a halt in her chest when he kissed her, big hands on her neck, her waist, proving that she was his.

Except...sometimes that embrace was so suffacating that she would find herself gasping for air afterwards, and she would wake up with nightmares about being crushed under the weight of Harry's huge embrace.

She supposed she was lucky: her childhood crush, the boy who had saved her life so many years ago, had fallen in love with her. But she was still only seventeen. Seventeen, and with an entire lifetime to live.

So for her last year of Hogwarts, she played Quidditch with as much passion and fire as she loved Harry with, hoping that, perhaps, she would get all the answers she needed soaring far above the world.

And, if that didn't work, at least her problems didn't seem quite so bad from up there.

**.***.**

**We always wanted to play Quidditch.**

**Just putting that out there. **


	8. Beginnings and Endings

_"I'll join you when hell freezes over! Dumbledore's Army!" **Neville Longbottom**_

**Beginnings and Endings**

**Bill **paced nervously outside the door to Fleur's room, after being banished by the lithe veela cousins who said that his scarred visage was scaring his wife.

"She's going to be fine." Charlie muttered from the chair he'd taken up hours ago. "Stop pacing, Bill, you're making me dizzy."

He collapsed into the seat next to his brother's, head in hands. He'd only called Charlie for this one, because if he called all of his siblings they would have taken up the entire ward and because Charlie was the only one he would ever allow to see him this _vulnerable_. For the others, he had to be the oldest Weasley, had to be the big brother. And he never resented that. It was just that sometimes he really, really didn't need that kind of responsibility.

Like when a whole new responsibility was coming into his life.

He thought, and told to Charlie, who was trying to ignore him, of every worst-case scenario that could happen to a woman in labor, all ending with his wife's death. "Bill, you're going to make yourself crazy…" but even Charlie couldn't ignore the fact that the pregnancy had been a difficult one for tiny Fleur, that, sometimes, magic couldn't heal everything.

And then Gabriella came floating out of the delivery room, her smile, so like her sister's, lighting up the room. "Et is a girl." She pronounced, and Bill nearly mowed her down trying to get to his wife. Trying to get to his new daughter.

**Ron** gaped at Harry. "What do you mean you're breaking it off?"

"Ron…" Harry began, flopping down on the grass. They were waiting for the train to take them away from Hogwarts for the last time, and he and Ron had moved far away from the rest. Ron said that he had something to ask Harry. Harry said he had something to tell Ron.

"She's the one who broke up with me." Harry said, eyes looking up at the sun so that he could blame the drops of moisture that leaked from his brilliant green eyes (so like this mother's...) on the harsh rays. "Ginny's the one…" But he didn't get much past that. Her name stuck in his throat.

Ron flopped onto the grass next to his best friend. They were old now. Ron had just turned nineteen, and Harry would catch up to him in a month. They seemed to have finally stopped growing, and though Ron still had an inch and a half on the Boy Who Lived, Harry, at six-foot-two, was no shrimp. Though they would never say it out loud, both knew that their striking good looks made them the most drooled-over pair in school. Add the fact that they had saved the Wizarding World, and forget it. They were irresistible.

Apparently to everyone but Ron's kid sister.

"I'm sorry, mate." He said finally. "I never thought…she's been after you since Second Year. You know that."

"Yeah." Harry said, hand curling into a fist. "Well, she says it's over now. She wants to play Quidditch for a couple of years, and then become an Auror or something. Says she doesn't want to be tied to my name forever. She wants to do stuff on her own. And she's definitely not ready to settle down." Harry barked out a laugh that sounded very much like Sirius's. "Like _any_ of us are ready to 'settle down.'"

"Umm…" Now Ron was stuck. He'd asked Hermione already, but had sworn her to secrecy. He had to be the one to tell Harry. He knew this. "Mate, that's not quite true."

Harry sat up suddenly, an incredulous eyebrow raised in expectation. "Don't tell me…"

"I asked Hermione to marry me." Ron said, the words coming out in a rush. "And she said yes."

Harry's whoop could be heard down by the other students waiting to board the train, and they all looked in time to see Harry tackle Ron in his excitement. "I can't believe it!" He said, "You guys have the most dysfunctional relationship in history!"

"Don't I know it." Ron said, looking immensely relieved at Harry's reaction. "Anyway, I wanted to ask if you would be best man."

Harry stopped short, holding Ron at arm's length. "Shouldn't one of your brothers? George, or Bill?" Ron had so many brothers, who all loved him to pieces. Why should he chose someone outside of his family?

Ron rolled his eyes. "Has anyone ever told you that, for the Boy Who Lived –twice – you can be quite thick?"

"You have." Harry said happily, still looking confused.

"Harry," Ron began, quite serious. "I've…I've risked my life for you. I would have died for you. You are at least as much a brother to me as those other blokes I've got."

He was so off-balanced by this open revelation that it took Harry a few moments to process it. When he did, he embraced Ron again, and the sound of the Hogwarts Steam Engine's whistle blew in the background when he told Ron that he wouldn't miss this opportunity for the world.

**Charlie,** who routinely wrestled with dragons, walked into a bar.

It's not the beginning of some really lame joke. Charlie Weasley actually did walk into the Leaky Cauldron a week after his oldest brother became a father, a day after he learned that his youngest brother was due to be married.

"Married!" He exclaimed to the boy behind the counter, a boy who couldn't have been much older than the one he was ranting about. "Just out of school and wants to be married!"

"A lot of people were doing it last year." The boy, who'd introduced himself as Ben, pointed out magnanimously. "Everyone was so afraid of the war that they just went out and got hitched."

"But he's just a kid." Charlie groaned, taking the drink in one hand. That wasn't right, though. Ron was anything but a kid. He had helped defeat the greatest threat of their time, had acted on nothing more than recklessness and whatever Weasley ingenuity had been passed along. And, Charlie realized right at that moment, he was very proud of him.

"So," The bartender, who was really only a boy, said, cleaning a cup with a bit of cloth. "You on your way to get married, too?"

Charlie shrugged. He'd never had a girlfriend, not really. In Hogwarts, he'd been popular – Quidditch captain, decent grades, and a big, Weasley personality had made him a lot of friends - but he'd only dated girls half-heartedly, and never for any length of time.

Now, looking at this dark, mysterious boy, Charlie felt something new and dangerous flip in his stomach, and he gulped, looking down in his tankard as if that could give him an answer to why his heart was beating so fast while looking into this boy's eyes.

**"Lee **Jordan, this is Lee Jordan coming to you with your morning broadcast on New World Radio.

"A year ago today was the devastating Battle of Hogwarts. One for the history books, folks, but that doesn't make up for the brave men and women who laid down their lives to create a world free of the Dark Lord. Now I'm a pretty smart guy, and I know that in the future this is going to be a day to remember, a day when little witches and wizards around the globe are going to be told the story of what happened at the best school of magic in the world. Of how noble, intelligent, good people went against pure evil and won. It sounds like an amazing story. I'm so thankful I'm around to tell it.

"And there is a lot to celebrate. But I think that we should take a couple of minutes today, right now, to remember the sixty-four good people who died that night so that we could keep our right to live free, no matter what our blood is made of.

"When I started this radio show, it was called Potter Watch. Remember that old thing? I was chasing after a bloke I'd gone to school with, carrying around some radio equipment and broadcasting every time I had a chance, hoping someone out there was listening. I was with my two best friends: Fred and George Weasley. Now it seems like everyone I run into has met a Weasley at one point or another, and I am the first to admit that there always seems to be a couple of them at any given event. But these two were – are – my dearest friends. Perhaps you have a couple yourself.

"We were on the run. We knew Harry Potter, for one. I'm a muggle-born, and they weren't quiet about the fact that they thought the Ministry was a load of garbage back then. We spent the whole year on the run, in a tent, broadcasting any news we could get our hands on. It was the hardest year of my life. Looking back on it, I think it was also the most rewarding.

"I was at the Battle of Hogwarts. I was with George Weasley when his brother – his twin – died. I walked into the Great Hall, the place I'd spent so many holidays and birthdays, the place I'd always felt safe in growing up at Hogwarts, and I saw people I'd known for years on the ground, bleeding and screaming and dying. And war was still raging around us.

"This isn't supposed to be a downer, folks, but I know that this day will go down in history. I just think that, while we should celebrate the fact that we rid our world of a great evil, we should also celebrate those sixty-four lives lost. My friend Fred Weasley was one of them. I'm opening up the lines now to hear about your loved ones. Honor them today, in any way you can."

**.***.**

**One year gone. So much can change in a year.**

**Anyways, please review.**


	9. Summer Loving

_"I know!" said Harry impatiently. "I can love!" It was only with great difficulty that he stopped himself from adding, "Big deal!"_

**Summer Loving**

**Oliver **didn't want to be in love with Cho Chang.

He and Cedric had never been tight. Oliver Wood never really became friends with the competition. Caused too much tension, since even his own team would accuse him of taking the game too seriously (like there was such a thing as taking the game too seriously!) But still, there was something about going out with the girl who he'd last seen when he went back to Hogwarts for the Triwizard Tournament, running down to the pitch and crying her eyes out…

Sometimes you just can't stop love. He was four years older than Cho by the time the girl got out of Hogwarts (she was one of the few who elected not to go back after the Battle was over. Puddlemere United had offered her position as starting chaser, and she took it. Later, she said it was because she couldn't stand being in the place where everyone she loved died. For many Hogwarts was a place of hope, but Cho saw it as a tomb.)

He was manager of Puddlemere by then, and had taken Cho under his wing, staying late for practices to help her get her moves down, playing Keeper when she needed someone to practice against, though he'd given up that position two years ago after a nasty Bludger had caused internal bleeding. And somewhere between the arguments that always seemed to break out and the snide comments, the rude words, the jokes that dated back to Wood's Hogwarts years…somewhere in there, something else happened.

Oliver Wood never wanted to be in love with Cho Chang, but now that he was, he couldn't imagine his world any other way.

**Harry** took over the Auror department two weeks before his best friend's wedding.

He had no trouble with the job. Everyone was ready and willing to follow the Boy Who Lived Twice, probably for the very reason that he'd managed to live twice. And just because Voldemort was gone didn't mean the department was twiddling their thumbs: many Death Eaters had gotten away from Hogwarts before the final fall, and there were periodic uprisings, quickly suppressed but nonetheless usually lethal.

He loved the work. He and his own small team of just two - Justin Finch-Fletchly, who had once accused Harry of being the Heir of Slytherin and had, more recently, saved Charlie Weasley during the Battle of Hogwarts, and Seamus, Seamus who had taken the position despite Dean's quiet pleadings because, frankly, he was very good – were making headway against the worst of the rebellions.

And that was all well and good, but the thing on Harry's mind now was Ron's wedding. Not because of the wedding itself – to Harry, this event had always been inevitable – but because he'd have to see Ginny there.

Ginny was Hermione's maid of honor. At the Leaky Cauldron a week ago, Ben the bar boy (who heard all of Harry's woes, now) had reminded Harry that it was the best man's job to walk the maid of honor down the aisle.

How was he supposed to do that with a girl who had stared him in the eyes and said that she didn't want to be with him anymore?

Everyone figured that after Voldemort things would get easier. And they did. Harry couldn't pretend that pining over a girl was the same as lying awake at night, hoping to god that she's still alive.

Still…sometimes Harry thought that he was screwed out of something somewhere along the way. Maybe he'd pissed someone off. Maybe he was just supremely unlucky. No matter what, it seemed like Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived Twice, could never seem to a catch a break.

**George** was just getting used to being a bachelor again when his life was turned upside down by a girl.

It wasn't like Angelina Johnson was a stranger or anything. She came to the joke shop once or twice a month just to say hey. They'd all been in the same year and, besides, Angelina was one of only a handful of people who would tell the twins to knock it off. Most just let them do their thing until it backfired. Angelina wasn't having any of it.,

George couldn't even pinpoint the exact day everything changed. It used to be that Angelina would come in and they'd talk, with George slipping innuendos in and Angelina snorting her laughter at them. In the beginning, they'd talked about the Battle. Katie Bell had died, and that was a blow to them both. Quidditch does something to you, makes you a family, but even George knew that Angelina was closer to Katie than he was. It was a girl thing.

So Angelina would mourn Katie and George would be nearly catatonic with his grief over Fred (he could never accurately describe it, even after his twin was back, even just to Fred himself. It was like something had ripped out his insides, so he was just hollow, and nothing could fill that space, not his other brothers, not Lee, not the shop…nothing.) And then it turned into something more.

One day, George asked if Angelina wanted to go to the Leaky Cauldron for drinks, because they were in the middle of an elaborate, interesting conversation and he was getting hungry. She said yes before she even thought about it.

One day, Angelina asked George if he would be her escort to the wedding of an old friend, a last-minute date, and she'd looked so grateful when George agreed on the spot.

One day, George left a thin gold chain on the counter of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes. That day happened to be Angelina's birthday.

And then the days started blurring, and the two were together more often than they weren't, and George found himself musing to Fred's portrait that he didn't know what his life would be like without Angelina in it.

**Fleur**, Hermione, and Ginny were the only ones in the girl's rooms at the Burrow right before the wedding. Later, it would be packed with rustling skirts and giggling girls and the sweet aroma of anticipation. But now it was just the three of them, and the two little ones.

Teddy had been at the house for two days now, and Harry doted on him. Fleur often found herself thinking, sadly, that the famous Harry Potter probably understood the child's plight before the child himself even recognized it. Growing up an orphan must have been difficult on the dark-haired wonder, and Fleur could see in Harry's every action that he was determined that Teddy's life be filled with love.

It had been Hermione who'd whisked the boy away, mostly because the house had been invaded by all the Weasley brothers and she was afraid of the influence Fred and George, in their high emotional state, might have on mild-mannered Teddy Lupin. So she'd scooped him up, and now the fifteen-month-old was toddling around the room, mumbling quietly to himself.

Or at least he had been until he spotted Victoire, fussing in her cradle. Even at a month old, the baby girl's startling good looks – obviously all from her mother, as even the signature Weasley red hair had passed her over – were obvious. Teddy himself never stayed in one appearance long enough for anyone to tell if he was handsome or otherwise. His abilities as a metamorphmagus seemed to have even surpassed his mother's, for he rarely looked the same for more than a hour.

Still, the sight of tiny Victoire seemed to pull the toddler from his romp. He was fixated on the small being, and stood on his tip-toes to look over the lip of the cradle.

"Oh!" Fleur gasped, watching as the whole bed rocked dangerously, but Ginny was already on her feet, scooping Teddy into her arms so the young boy could really see baby Victoire, half-asleep and stunningly beautiful.

Teddy reached out a hand and grabbed one of Victoire's flailing fists, and suddenly his deep brown eyes and dark hair (reminiscent of another beloved Lupin) changed in an instant. Fine white-blond hair and clear, blue eyes mirrored Victroire's own, and Teddy made a few incoherent babbles of delight.

"Wouldn't it be funny if…?" Hermione began, thinking of a future where an orphan boy could marry a Weasley, almost liking it to a present where an orphan boy was going to do the same.

She closed her mouth, though, and coughed lightly into her white, white dress, because the parallel wouldn't work. Ginny Weasley had rejected Harry Potter, and the future would always be different because of that.

**Ben **was surprised to be invited to the wedding.

Charlie, who had taken a post in Ireland for a year after the Battle of Hogwarts, studying the larger species that dwelt in the old land, came into the bar almost every day. Most of the time he was with a group – it seemed Weasleys travel in packs, and while that would have made Draco sneer it merely made Ben smile sadly. He wished he had built-in relationships like that.

But then, after everyone went off to their own lives, Charlie would still sit at the bar, talking amiably to Ben as he puttered around the counter, performing small house-keeping spells that he'd never had to use a year ago. It was in the wee hours of the morning, with only this red-head and an empty bar for company, that Ben found himself thinking wishfully of how much help a house-elf would be.

"Ben," Charlie said one of these nights, leaning over the counter, to aim his own spell at the cups that were stacking behind the bar. Ben shot him a grateful look as the flagons began to clean themselves, "you doing anything tomorrow?"

"No. I actually have the night off." He'd been planning on catching up on sleep, not much else. Not like he had friends to talk to, family to visit. But he knew that tomorrow was the wedding (if the group didn't invade his bar every night, the constant chatter about RonWeasleyandHermioneGranger would have tipped him off.) Strangely, Ben found himself hoping that this had something to do with the wedding. At least he wouldn't be alone.

And he wasn't far off the mark. Charlie, eight years older than Ben and a dragon-tamer to boot, didn't look at the younger man when he said, "I was wondering if you'd like to come to the wedding with me? Everyone's all paired up, you see."

"Even Fred?" Ben asked, flashing a toothy grin, and Charlie smiled back, remembering his younger brother's bellyaching about not being able to find a date in the portrait world.

"Yeah, he got in with a ballerina, or so George says. And it would be embarrassing to be the only one going stag."

"So I'm your date?"

Ben's innocent white grin completely floored Charlie, and he looked away before the bar boy could see the color flooding his face. Lee and Percy were going together, and Dean and Seamus and Luna were a strange threesome, so it wasn't like this necessarily had to be a romantic thing.

So why was Charlie Weasley shaking so hard at the prospect of being alone with Ben, with another man? He'd never considered the possibility of dating blokes, but there was something about Ben…

"Yeah, sure I'll come, Charlie. Thanks."

It was his voice, his smile, the way his eyes lit up with an inside fire and something almost like pain. It was the way that he never spoke of his past, or his family (and for someone with a lot of family this was a novelty, a pity). It was the way Charlie would apparate to the Leaky Cauldron every night without fail, despite the fact that there were bars closer to his work, with people that he worked with. Because he was constantly thinking about this mysterious Ben, and sometimes his thoughts startled him, surprised him, but always, always in a way that made him nervously excited for what the future may hold.

**.***.**

**please review.**


	10. Wedding Day Woes

_Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. **Deathly Hallows**_

**Wedding Day Woes**

**Luna** needed a date for the wedding of the century, and she chose Dean over Seamus.

Now, it was a quiet thing, and she pulled aside the Irish boy before she did it, so worried about hurting his feelings that Seamus found himself apologizing instead of the other way around. Still, the rejection hurt the young man, and he found himself looking at his best friend with something like jealousy. Why Dean over him, Seamus?

It was late evening, the day before the wedding, and they were still at their place in Ireland. It was a small house with the property to expand, and Luna had insisted on first a horse, then sheep and a cow and ducks and a goat and now they were on a real farm that was tough to maintain but a real pleasure to look at. With the sun setting over it, and the temperature just right, Seamus found himself thinking that maybe _this_ is what they were fighting Voldemort for – not just their lives but the right to live in peace.

"Mate," Dean said, sitting on the step next to his oldest friend and handing over an iced butterbeer, a peace offering, "This doesn't change anything."

"How can I live in a house with a couple?" Seamus muttered, "It's…it's just _off_."

"Well, Luna's a bit off herself. C'mon, she doesn't want you to leave, and I don't want you to leave, and this house is mostly yours, anyway. Who says we can't all live together?"

There were a thousand tiny excuses why not, most of them having to do with the sheer awkwardness of the situation, but in the end, Seamus could not come up with a rational reason not to live with his two best friends in the world, except for the fact that he was still in love with one of them, and he didn't want to show it for fear of breaking Dean's heart.

"I'll stay," he whispered into the wind, and Dean smiled, thinking that at least this hurtle had passed. Seamus knew, though. He knew in his heart that this was only the beginning of their troubles.

**Harry** had attended exactly one wedding in his entire life, and it had kicked off a year that he would rather not revisit.

This wedding wasn't shaping up to be much better.

For one thing, he had just put down a legion of Death Eaters not far from the Burrow, but even worries about a dark insurrection were not enough to quell the sickening feeling he got whenever he thought of walking Ginny down the aisle.

"Okay, mate." Ron had said on his wedding day, clasping Harry on the shoulder as they looked into the mirror. There was no trace of boyhood in either of them anymore – Ron had grown into his long nose and lanky limbs to become quite a handsome young man, with intelligent, laughing eyes and a quick smile. Harry's features were darker, quieter, but the glasses and shaggy hair, grown for the sole purpose of covering that old scar, managed to give even this most famous man in the Wizarding World an air of mystery. "I thought _you_ were supposed to be the one who was comforting _me_."

"Come off it, Ron, you were born to marry Hermione. You guys were a done deal by the end of First Year." Harry had never doubted that his best friends would get together. It was his own relationship he was worried about. "But I thought it was my best mate's job to bash the girl who broke my heart."

"And I really would, even though she'd my sister, but that bat-bogey hex really is a whopper, and I just don't need that on my wedding day."

"I can respect that."

They gazed into the mirror for a while longer, looking for some traces of their past. There were the scars that wrapped themselves around Ron's arm, memories from a brain that would be there for life. There was Harry's lightning scar, of course. There were those things hidden by clothes and years of almost-healing – Ron's leg, broken by Sirius before they really knew him; Harry's arm, which had once lost all of its bones during a Quidditch match; the swatch of skin missing from Ron's shoulder from an apparition gone wrong…

"We turned out okay, huh Harry?"

"Yeah." Harry mused, wondering when exactly they'd grown up. He turned away from a mirror, towards the light. "Let's get you married, Ron."

**Lee**, the rest of the Weasley brothers, and, strangely, Ben, were on protection duty.

Their theory was this: everyone who'd ever gone against Voldemort were gathering in one place. There were still people who believed Voldemort had the right idea. Those people were still dangerous. And the Weasley brothers, though they may tease the ever living daylights out of him, wanted nothing to screw up ickle Ronnie kin's wedding.

So they cast every charm and hex in the book, or at least they thought so, and then they scattered, because they all had things to do before the wedding. Get chairs, put up decorations, direct people to their seats, fend off rude remarks from dear old Auntie Muriel. Soon, the charms were forgotten.

And that would come back to bite them in the end.

**Hermione** pressed her head against Harry's chest, tears welling in her eyes.

"I couldn't do it."

"I'm so sorry." He held her, because he knew the pain of being orphaned, knew the sting that came with abandonment. His parents were dead, and had become heroes, martyrs, to boot, but all that hadn't helped their one-year-old son. Hermione was going to retrieve her parents from Australia where she'd sent them for safety during the war.

"They were…so happy." She sobbed, "I couldn't…my mother was pregnant. They…they…why would they want me?" Her years at Hogwarts had been difficult – how to tell these muggles that she lived with about her life at Hogwarts without scaring them, without letting on that the friends she had were fighting the greatest threat to both worlds on an annual basis. She had put them in danger, and who was she to drag them back to that life?

"Oh…your robes." She made a few small swipes at Harry's dress robes, which was now damp, tear-stained. She looked like she was going to cry again before Harry drew his wand and dried the clothes with one of Hermione's own spells. The two looked at each other once the charm was done and Hermione gave a watery smile, which Harry returned gladly.

"Harry…" She began quietly, putting her small hand in his big, broad one. She remembered when they were the same size. She remembered that year that she'd grown and was half an inch bigger than him. Ron was the love of her life, had always been, but Harry was important to her, too. "Will you walk me down the aisle?"

"Of course." He kissed her cheek, because she looked like she needed it. "You look beautiful, Hermione."

The smile she wore through her tears was radiant.

**Arthur** and Molly Weasley were killed right after they watched their youngest son get married.

They were moving towards the red head and the radiant young woman who used to be a little girl and wondering where all the time had gone when there was a scream. Arthur turned just in time to see that bar boy, Ben, who had come with Charlie (he was going to pull that boy aside some time tonight, just to talk, to catch up, because he felt like he was missing something every time his second oldest looked into the bar boy's eyes) was on the ground, blood pouring out of wounds on his stomach, chest.

_Sectumsempra_.

Arthur was pulling out his wand before he even realized what he was doing. He shared one quick look with his wife – he wanted to stay with her, but his kids…they were grown, but they were still his children. _Their_ children – and kissed her swiftly. They separated, Arthur to Charlie, Molly to Ron and Ginny.

It was chaos, and Charlie was the only thing not moving in a sea of stampeding feet, of screams, of flashes of light. He had his wand out, muttering quiet words in an attempt to stop the bleeding.

"Get him inside!" Arthur shouted over the din. Charlie didn't look at him - his surprised, concerned face was still turned down towards Ben, and Arthur grabbed his son by the shoulders, speaking quickly. "Inside!" He remembered the wards. How had they broken through? "You can't apparate, though! And _Sectumsempra_ is hard to reverse unless you know the counter curse – bandages and warm water! Go, Charlie!"

It was a lucky thing that his son was tall, like Ron, like Percy, and that the bar boy was small, compact, thin, for it meant that Charlie was able to scoop the bleeding boys into his arm and turn fast.

But not fast enough that a Death Eater couldn't catch up to them.

What could he do? Arthur was old, had lived through two wars, had fathered seven children, had lived to see them grow into spectacular adults...and Charlie was just beginning his life. It was his duty as a father, as a human being. He jumped into front of the wand an instant before the killing curse would have hit two young men.

He crumpled to the ground, leaving Charlie to turn tail and run away from his father, run for his life and for the life of the boy he was holding. And he would always know, and live with the guilt, that his father had died saving him.

**Percy** was the second of the family to run inside the house with an injured man draped across his shoulders. He barely nodded at his older brother, too intent upon the partner he'd been working with for the last year. "Lee? Lee, breathe, c'mon..."

Charlie was wrapping bandages around Ben's limp body, actually grateful that the smaller man had passed out from the blood loss. At least he wasn't screaming anymore...but Percy's frantic voice jerked him out of whatever strange trance he was in fromt he sight of Ben's blood. "Perce? What happened?"

"I didn't see what he was hit with," Percy's words were jumbled together, thick with emotion that Charlie had rarely seen on this brother, "We were with Fred and George and suddenly there were...and I turned around and in that second...it could have been _Avada Kadavra_. I just don't know."

Charlie spared one glance for the black man that was laid out across the floor. "It's asphyxiation. An old jinx I've seen used in animal fighting." He wished he'd seen it sooner. You can die from asphyxiation as easily as from a green jet of light (like his father, like Arthur, who had jumped in front of that green light, but he couldn't think about _that_ now.) The blood was pouring through Ben's bandages, but Charlie managed to get his wand from his robes (and he really hated dress robes now, he always forgot where the pockets were) and aimed the counter-curse he thought he'd forgotten long ago across the room.

Percy looked down at Lee, put his ear close to his mouth, and then cast Charlie the most frightened look yet. "He's still not breathing!"

**Ron** wished he could tell Hermione to run, like they had the last time they were at a wedding (and did anyone else see a pattern here?) but he knew his new wife would have none of it. So they took off together as party guests started disapperating and the strong, or maybe just the reckless, were left behind.

He aimed a spell over Fleur's shoulder and ran up to his sister-in-law, who was holding Victoir and little Teddy. "Get out of here!" He yelled at her, shooting another spell.

For an instant, the beautiful woman's face twisted, and Ron could tell that she wanted to join in the fray. She was a previous TwiWizard champion, after all. Then Teddy let out a scared cry, and she was torn. "Bill!"

Ron knew that hsi brother would much rather see Fleur and the babies safely away from here. "He'll be alright. I promise." He shot another _expelliarmus_ back over Fleur's shoulder, giving her just enough time to apparate away from the scene.

When he turned around, Ron couldn't find Hermione anywhere.

**Nobody** saw Molly Weasley die, caught by a killing curse as she was sprinting towards her daughter, who never turned around. Nobody saw Neville Longbottom take out three Death Eaters by standing on top of one of the dainty wedding tables. Nobody saw Seamus get seperated from Dean, from Luna, and get _crucio_d as he was questioned about whether or not Harry Potter was at the wedding, so nobody could have heard that Seamus said absolutely nothing, just screamed and screamed.

Nobody saw more witches and wizards arrive, people from the Ministry who had been alerted by a patronus sent by a beautiful girl desperate to see her husband alive. Nobody knew when the tide began turning and the Death Eaters started to disapperate from the battle.

They all had more important things to worry about.

**.***.**

**please review.**


	11. Chaos Theory

_Numbing the pain for a while will make it all the worse when you finally feel it. **Dumbledore**_

**Chaos Theory**

**Neville **went out into the yard to try to pick up the pieces, mostly because he didn't want Dean to do it first. He couldn't imagine anything worse than stumbling upon your best friend and finding him dead. So he went, slipped out before the head count had really been taken, and got into step alongside Harry.

"I'm surprised you're not inside." Neville said. He knew, or sensed at the very least, that the Weasley parents had been important people in Harry's life. Their deaths must have been as great a blow to him as it was to their blood children.

"Don't want to get in the way. This is their family." Harry stared straight at the ground, probably because he didn't want Neville to notice the tear that slipped past those glasses onto the ground. Neville did notice, and didn't comment. "Guess we're just adding more people to the list of orphans these wars have created."

Neville swallowed hard. His parents weren't dead, but sometimes he thought of them that way. Sometimes (and he felt awful for these times) he almost wished they were, because he had a feeling that their continued existence was just making these once powerful and proud people miserable.

Instead of commenting on that, though, he snatched another piece from that sentence. "You think this is going to be another war?"

Harry shrugged. "Not like Voldemort, maybe, I don't think it's organized enough for that, but is the animosity boiling up again? Yeah, I think so, Nev."

That's when they happened to walk far enough out into the field to peer around the side of the house, when Neville saw the heap of blood and clothes that turned out to be Seamus. He gasped, Harry ran, and eventually they were on either side of their old roommate. Neville could almost hear their hearts thundering in unison.

"Is he…?"

"He's breathing!" But Neville couldn't tell if this was a fact or a wish. When he gathered Seamus's head from off the ground and put it on his own blood and mud spattered robes. He gave the whole body a little shake.

"Seamus? Shay, come on, old sod, Ron's going to be pissed you're taking all the thunder out of his wedding day."

The hand that shot out and caught Harry's wrist surprised all of them, Seamus included. He opened his eyes wide, mouth moving even as blood spilled over his teeth. Neville shot a glance at Harry – this was bad. They needed some real healers, and fast.

But words were coming out now, and Neville leaned close to hear them. "I didn't…didn't tell them _anything_." His eyes started to roll towards the back of his head when they snapped back, focused again for a heartbeat. "Harry. They want…H-Harry."

And then Seamus went limp, and frighteningly quiet.

**Ron** just clutched Hermione's hand, holding onto it like a lifeline as he stared down at his parents, laid out on the living room floor like discarded things. He was swaying slightly, unable to actually process what had happened. There had been a battle, and Death Eaters, and he remembered fighting them off while trying to keep Hermione in sight…Hermione.

He kissed her hair, unaware of the tears that flowed into it. The voices around him were strange, hazy, and no one was making any sense until Bill roared, his face desperate, his words pleading. "Fleur! Did anyone see Fleur?"

"And the babies!" That was Ginny, Ginny who wouldn't walk down the aisle with Harry, like any of that mattered now. "Teddy! Victoir!"

And there was something important about that, if only Ron could get his mouth unstuck, if only the words would come (but his parents were dead, dead on his wedding day, and how could words change that?) "Bill…" but his voice wasn't loud enough and he sagged against Hermione. Suddenly, he was very, very tired.

A hand gripped his arm and Ron turned to George. Somehow, this brother managed to steady him. "C'mon, Ronnie, what are you saying?"

"Fleur left with the babies." Ron whispered. "I…I made her disapperate."

The hand around his arm tightened. "Good boy." This gentle praise, coupled with Hermione's hand in his, made Ron smile, just a bit.

And then he collapsed into George's arms, and Fred's high voice rang out above the hubbub of the house, and Hermione's face was pressing against his, her hands clutched his face, and the last thing Ron thought was that she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world.

**Percy** went into the room where Harry and the other Gryffindor boys were sitting around Seamus. He didn't like this job, didn't want it at all. "Harry…"

The Boy Who Lived Twice looked up, and his scar stood out stark against his pale, pale face. He didn't say anything, just stared at Percy for a heartbeat, two, before saying, quietly, low, "Who is it, Perce?"

"Ron." And his parents, and so many others who had come to attend a wedding, like that bar boy that Charlie was working over feverishly, like Lee, his partner for a year, who had broken his arm and collarbone and wouldn't even tell anyone for fear of taking the attention off of those who need it more.

Harry was on his feet already, brushing past Percy, and he let him go. What can you say to make this better? It was his youngest brother, it was his wedding day, it was his parents, it was his partner.

It was a mess, and amongst all the boys clustered around another young man desperately clinging to life, Percy Weasley, who always had it together, felt tears dripping silently down his cheeks.

**Bill** tried to calm his brothers, but he was making no headway, not through his own overwhelming grief.

All the others had each other. There was this unspoken rule among them that the oldest had to mentor the one below, and so on. So Bill had Charlie to teach about exactly when it was best to hex Slytherins, and Charlie had Percy, admittedly the most difficult, but if anyone could bring out the good parts in Percy's often uptight personality it was charismatic, jovial Charlie Weasley, and Percy had the twins, a surprising combination that at least partly tempered the twins too-big personalities, and the twins had Ron, an easy relationship with much ribbing and biting remarks but so much love it was palpable, Ron had little Ginny, who was the pet of all of them, and it seemed to Bill at least that somewhere along the way they'd stopped being sibling and started being real friends.

But the point is that Bill had nobody above him to show him the ropes. He'd had to stumble along as best he could, being the oldest of a large family, and he'd only had his parent's gentle neglect to lead him into adulthood. Which made him close to them in ways that the younger ones could never be.

Still, it was his responsibility, and knowing that Fleur and the babies were safe made it easier for him to skip between his brothers and offer whatever comfort he could.

…There was Charlie, working with Kingsley, the two best healers they had, kneeling over that boy that Charlie had brought to the wedding, the boy who'd taken _sectumsempra_ to the chest.

…There was the twins, Percy, Hermione, Harry, Lee, all crowded into one room around Ron, who was bleeding, but there was also something wrong inside, something that they couldn't see, and he needed a healer but one of the other party guests had said that St. Mungo's was being overrun by Death Eaters. The twins were yelling at Lee for not telling them about his arm, but the black boy just shrugged, held his arm close. "I can get healed later." He said, then turned to Harry. "How's Seamus?"

"No idea. It was _crucio_, and I don't know…it could have been less than a minute, or ten minutes, his mind could be completely gone."

Bill then had the singular experience of watching the savior of the wizarding world look over at his best friend, Bill's youngest brother, and suddenly burst into tears. It was George who put an arm around him, who let him sob and sob for lives lost on a day that should have been amazing.

Then Hermione went over, reaching out the hand that wasn't already clutching Ron's to her other friend, and the three, the three that Lee had called on that radio show of his "The Golden Trio" were connected again.

"It'll be okay, Harry." She said, leaning her head against his shoulder.

Bill had to leave then, putting a hand up to his mouth to literally catch the thing he'd been about to say, which was that it wasn't going to be okay. It wasn't going to be okay at all.

**.***.**

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	12. Funeral

_"We must not sink beneath our anguish, but battle on." **Dumbledore **_

**Funeral**

**Harry** sat on the edge of the bed, letting Hermione fuss over him. She tied his tie, smoothed his hair, straightened his glasses, and finally he was completely presentable and she just sat next to him and cried and cried and cried.

Harry didn't know what to do about that.

**Ben **wondered how much longer he could keep up the charade now that he found himself falling in love with Charlie Weasley.

Yes, he knew how abysmal his timing was, but after everything that went down at the wedding, after Charlie hadn't left his side all night, just cried and cried for his dead parents and his brother…Ron…Ben – or Draco, at least – had known Ron, and felt an unexpected pang when he heard of the pain this poor, good-hearted, wonderful family was going through. Anyway, it was after that night that Ben realized he was well and truly in love with Charlie.

After a night of restless indecision, he knew that his options really boiled down to two: either come clean with Charlie and the Weasley clan, tell him he was Draco Malfoy and beg for forgiveness (before, Draco would never have thought about begging blood-traitors for anything, but he had never really been in love before. He would go to the moon and back if that was what it would take to make Charlie smile.)

The other option was quieter, would keep his secret, such as it was, but would also cause pain on both sides. He could run, flee from the care and kindness he'd been shown, run from the Leaky Cauldron and old, worrying Tom and the wonderful, strange customers who would lay their problems on the table for a stranger as long as that stranger was pouring the drinks. This option, to Ben, was barely an option at all. He was afraid of what it would do to Charlie in the wake of recent events, but he was also dreadfully afraid that the act of separating himself would kill him. Literally. He was strangely sure that if he put any distance between himself and this man that he'd grown to love that he would die of a broken heart.

**Bill** scanned the crowd for the other red-heads. He'd been doing this all day – taking roll call, counting over and over again to make sure they were all there.

That night after Ron's wedding, with his parent's bodies in the front yard and Ron bleeding, drowning, in the drawing room, was the worst night of Bill's life, topping all those hellish hours after the attack from Greyback, topping all the battles he'd been in. He'd gaped down at his youngest brother, remembering that a scant year earlier he'd been in a similar position. He'd wondered how many brothers he'd have to watch die. He remembered thinking that with Ron running around with the Boy Who Lived it was a miracle he'd lasted this long. He remembered hating himself for thinking that.

And he remembered the exact second, around four in the morning, when Ron stopped breathing. He remembered Hermione's scream, remembered hearing a soft moan from Harry.

And he remembered the next wonderful minute, when familiar blue eyes blinked open and held his. Ron was looking for reassurances, for comfort, and he turned to Bill, the oldest, the one with all the answers.

"It's going to be okay, Ron." He'd murmured, touching his brother's clammy, damp skin. Hermione was crying in earnest now. George was trying to pry her arms away from Ron's neck.

Despite the deaths, despite the injuries and nightmares and resurging war, Bill looked at that night as a victory. With his parents gone, he was the head of the family. And none of that family was going to be dying on his watch.

**Dean **was standing next to the coffins when Harry came up to him. He was straightening the portraits he'd drawn – large, beautiful paintings of the Weasley couple, heartbreak coming through in each perfect line, and Harry knew in that moment that the world had been deprived of a great artist when Dean Thomas went to work for the understaffed Ministry of Magic.

"I didn't expect to see you here." The raven-haired man said, voice soft and guilt-ridden.

"How could I miss this, Harry?" Dean whispered into the wind. It was surprisingly cold for July, and he was glad for his dress robes as he wrapped his arms across his chest. Suddenly it was like there was something in his throat, and no matter how many times he swallowed it stayed there, unmoving, which is why his next words came out like a strangled sob. "Shay doesn't…it's not your fault, Harry. Any of it."

"He's awake then?" Here's something a lot of people don't know about Hogwarts: roommates are like the brothers you never wanted to have, but the bond was there anyway. His concern over Seamus had sometimes even taken his mind off the mind-numbing grief he felt walking around the Burrow, waiting for the funeral.

"Yeah. Well, sometimes." Dean was staring straight ahead, "Mostly he just cries. Like he can't help it. I think he's having nightmares even when he's awake now. You know that Shay's were always worse than any of ours."

Harry nodded, remembering many a night in Gryffindor Tower when he was jarred from his sleep by a sharp cry from the Irish boy.

"He thinks he's back with the Carrows. He thinks I'm dead. He thinks Luna's dead. He thinks he betrayed you and all the other Aurors. And then he wakes up from all of it and remembers the wedding and the deaths and he loses it again." Dean shook his head, determined not to cry. A few tears slid treacherously down his cheek anyway. He felt like he was losing his best friend, and there was nothing he could do about it.

"Dean…" Harry began, but the black boy just shook his head, pressing a shaking hand over his eyes and drawing a deep, steadying breath. In the end, he offered Harry a watery smile that turned suddenly hard. The look was so uncharacteristic of the jovial, mild Dean that Harry actually took a step backwards.

"Just find those bastards Harry, alright? Find them and kill them all."

**Ginny** stayed close to Ron all day, mostly because she could feel the stares of the crowd all around her and couldn't quite stand to be the source of their fury. Yes, the Wizarding World was again under siege by a dark force. Yes, there were deaths, among them her own mother and father (and if she thought about them too much she began to cry, so she wouldn't.) But still, the fact that Ginny Weasley broke up with the famous Harry Potter was the gossip of a century.

It was so unfair, too, that Harry had been such a gentleman about it. That he had given her room and hadn't badmouthed her to the press that was constantly hanging around the Boy Who Lived Twice. It cast her in the role of villain, a role that she'd never sought and hadn't wanted when the whole mess began.

She didn't need Lavender Brown to remind her that she'd mooned over Harry her first three years at Hogwarts, that she used to doodle his name in her notebooks as young girls were apt to do. She _had_ thought that Harry was the love of her life, and that was exactly the problem.

So many people thought that she became tired of constantly being put in the line of fire, or of her boyfriend always being attacked. That wasn't the case at all – she still believed in Harry and would fight at his side any day. Besides, her relationship hadn't stopped any of her brothers, all of whom were deeply loyal to Harry, and she could never wait quietly on the sidelines while the boys fought for her.

No, the reason she'd broken up with him was the same as the reason why she'd dated sweet Michael Corner or the shy, reliable Dean Thomas. She was experimenting, trying to see if what she felt for Harry was enough to get them through the rest of their lifetimes. Wasn't that healthy? Wasn't she supposed to be absolutely certain before she rushed headlong into marriage?

If Harry hadn't been so famous it wouldn't be an issue, and she wouldn't be hiding at her own parent's funeral, but in this scenario it was Ginny Weasley who'd come off worse, and so she clung to Ron as her brother looped laboriously around the cemetery, doing his job as the dutiful son by accepting the sympathies of those who had not been Arthur and Molly's flesh and blood.

Ron was still hurt. Something had happened on his wedding day, something inside him had been damaged, and the combined knowledge of Kingsley Shaklebolt, her brothers Charlie and Bill, and Hermione, who was so clever with a wand, hadn't been enough to repair it entirely.

Perhaps that was for the best, though. It was a physical pain, something so much easier to deal with than the pain of knowing that your parents had died on your wedding day while doing their best to keep you safe.

**Lee **watched the best-attended funeral in the history of the Wizarding World - other than that of Albus Dumbledore himself - from the sidelines, which was not in his character.

In the days after the wedding, he had hardly left the twins' sides. First the death of their parents had shaken the normally unflappable duo, and they'd spent the night raging at Lee about not getting his arm looked at, their voices rising to such a level that Hermione, harried after watching her new husband nearly die on their wedding day, finally pointed her wand in Lee's direction and mended the arm.

After that, there was nothing for the twins to do but face their grief. It was the very next morning that Fred disappeared from his portrait, sending George into near-hysteria. The loss of his parents he could deal with, if he had to, but he'd been dreading from the start the thought of Fred disappearing again. That the two should happen so close together nearly killed him.

Fred returned that afternoon, and it was Lee's turn to rage. Lee, who, like the twins, normally never resorted to raising his voice – there was usually such a din around him that he didn't care to add to it – screamed out of fear and worry at the portrait of his best friend for a good five minutes before the red-head could get a word in.

He'd been to the Other Side, Fred said, and had spotted their parents. They were distraught, mostly because they didn't know the outcome of the battle. Fred had told him what he knew about this uprising, and had forced himself to leave before getting too emotional.

"Great!" George had said, "At least we'll be able to talk to them."

But Fred had looked doubtful. It had taken a lot out of him, that journey to the Other Side. He wasn't sure if he could pull it off again, not if he wanted to remain in the land of the living with his favorite brother.

And so the thought that they might again talk to their parents vanished with Fred's words.

Ever since the wedding Lee had been thinking, and it was on the day of the funeral that he found Bill. Bill had left Hogwarts a year before he had entered, and so he never really knew the older man past the fact that he had the hottest wife in history and was crazy good with a wand. "I want to join the new Order."

There had been such a rush of people to join the new Order of the Phoenix that Bill, (the de-facto leader now that Dumbledore, Snape, Lupin, Tonks, Moody, and the Weasley parents had whittled the old troop down to the remaining Weasleys, Kingsley, old Mrs. Longbottom, and the aging teachers of Hogwarts) had had to turn people away.

Bill had looked at Lee. Lee, who had been hanging around the twins so much his father used to refer to them as the triplets. Lee, who had stuck by the twins for that year that they'd run from the Death Eaters, who had started an illegal and dangerous radio program to support Dumbledore's side, who even now, even with his own friends dead, didn't show his grief in front of those he longed to help, and suddenly Bill felt a surge of compassion for this young man.

"You already are helping more than you know. That radio program you have is getting so many new recruits. We can fight them if they keep coming." Bill put a hand on Lee's shoulder. "Keep doing what you're doing. Just don't get caught, okay?"

"Yeah," Lee promised, which just goes to show that you should never make promises you can't keep.

**.***.**

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	13. War What is it Good For?

_"What's comin' will come, and we'll just have to meet it when it does." **Hagrid**_

**War (What is it Good For?)**

**Hermione** was just finishing her second book when she got married, found out she was pregnant, and war broke out.

Since her last pregnancy had ended with a painful and devastating miscarriage, she didn't share this particular news with anybody, not even Ron (Ron, who she realized her wedding night, when she was still in her long white dress and he was still in his dress robes that brought out his eyes, who she loved more than life itself).

Her book was already slated to come out, and she went on Lee Jordan's show to promote it, not that it really needed it. According to the sales, just about every witch and wizard who spoke English had bought her last book, which was the story of the year that Voldemort was defeated, starting with a different wedding and ending at Hogwarts, cataloguing the night through her own recollections and stories people had told her.

Her second book was the back story. _Hogwarts, a History_ had given her a deep appreciation for biographies, and so many owls had shown up at her doorstep requesting more about the Boy Who Lived Twice's growing-up years that she decided to pen a long work that would be published in six parts, one for each year. Essentially working backwards, yes, but Hermione found that it was quite fun and very nostalgic to think all the way back to first year.

And it was nice, too, to interview Harry for the books. She'd never known about some of the things, like the bouts of accidental magic he performed before Hogwarts, or how his relatives kept him in a closet under the stairs. Those long afternoons spent with Harry and, more often than not, Ron, were among the most enjoyable since Hogwarts. Being around the two men she loved most in the world made her feel happy and alive.

But the series would have to be put on hold after this book. After the horrors of the wedding, with another dark force rising, there would be no time for afternoons spun out on porches and in cafes, talking of times gone by. Harry would be needed to spearhead the attack. And Ron…

"You're a good fighter." Harry had said, standing in the Burrow's parlor an afternoon not long after the Weasley parent's funeral. It had been almost a week, and still Hermione could not believe that the Burrow was her home now, as it had been left to Ron in his parent's will. She was on the couch, one hand draped absently over her belly, watching as Harry and Ron eyed each other from across the room.

"Really, Ron, there's almost nobody else who has the experience you and Hermione have. Justin's dead, and Seamus is not coming back any time soon. I need people I can trust to have my back."

"Harry…" Ron said in a pained voice, looking between his best friend and his wife, who was still watching, biting her lip to keep from butting in. She knew there were times when the boys just had to work things out for themselves. "Become an Auror? Mate, I've followed you into a lot of places, but…"

"You used to want to be an Auror." Harry pointed out fairly.

"I wasn't married, then. I didn't have responsibilities."

"Fred and George are closing the joke shop temporarily. They're helping Bill with the new Order." Harry ran a hand through his hair. "I wouldn't ask if I wasn't out of options, Ron. I need you."

Hermione knew that Ron was missing the battles, the thrill that came when you faced off against an opponent with only a couple of sticks of wood between you. The red-head glanced at her, then down at his own legs. Though he'd mostly healed from the attack at their wedding, he was still moving slower than usual.

"You have to watch out for him, Harry." She said, making the decision for him. "He's in more pain than he'll admit from the wedding. And I don't want to open my door to find you on my doorstep to tell me that my husband is dead."

"You won't." Harry said, crossing his heart and grinning like a schoolboy. "I promise."

**Bill** couldn't believe it was all happening so fast.

First the death of his parents (and others…Ernie McMillian and Justin Finch-Fletchly; Katie Bell and Hannah Abbot and Michael Corner and oh, there had been so many people, so many brave and talented young people…) then McGonagall had approached him with the startling and singularly unwanted proposition of him taking over the Order.

"What about Kingsley?" He sputtered, looking frankly scared. "Or you, Professor?"

"Kingsley is busy performing his duties as Minister of Magic, as you well know, and I am no spring chicken, Mr. Weasley. You are a competent wizard, and you have the heart for this."

What she'd meant by 'heart' he still didn't know. Mostly, Bill scared people. Little kids on the street, mostly, but he also scared Victoire if she awoke suddenly in the night and saw his scarred visage, and that would make him feel like he couldn't help anybody, let alone run the most affective and important defense society in the world.

But run it he did, and Fleur refused to leave his side even with another baby on the way. Harry said he could use Grimwald Place again, and it was much nicer-looking than it had been previously, Harry having completely redecorated it, with Ginny's help, the summer before so now it heavily resembled the brightly-lit and cheerful Gryffindor Common Room.

Even that he could take, though: the work and the stress of putting people on missions, of learning every awful thing about their enemy, of keeping track of dozens of people. He could have stood it all, if it hadn't been for his siblings.

Every one of them insisted on being in the Order. Charlie and Percy he could hardly keep out, and with them came Ben, who was ever-present at Charlie's side now, and Lee, Percy's business partner and the twins' best friend.

And then the twins closed up _Weasley's Wizard Wheezes,_ and Bill tracked them down at the Leaky Cauldron and raged at them, an anger that was really just concern and anxiety, because there were so many people he loved on the frontlines.

He'd always been completely transparent. At the end, Fred looked up at him from the portrait and said. "George'll be careful, Billy. And I have an idea."

Which is how a copy of Fred's portrait came to be in Shell Cottage, in Grimwald Place, in St. Mungo's and the Ministry and all over the Wizarding World, so that he could alert the head of the Order about what was happening.

So he could tell Bill which member of his ever-growing family had died.

**Hagrid** looked down at Dennis, who was sitting cross-legged on the floor, laughing as a niffler poked its long silky nose into his ear. Something swelled inside the half-giant's huge chest – there was something about this boy that made him feel…paternal.

It was different from his relationship with the Golden Trio. Though those three had been closer to him than any of the other dozens of students who had wormed his way into his great heat over the past fifty years, they'd all had their own families (except Harry, and Hagrid had to admit that the Boy Who Lived Twice was a special favorite).

But Dennis had no one to turn to. It used to be him and his brother, clumsy and bumbling in their own ways, constantly together, and they'd both been lovers of animals and enjoyed Hagrid's class.

When Colin died, Dennis's mother, the only other family he had, had sent him a letter and a couple of galleons, telling her fourteen-year-old son to never contact her again.

After that, Dennis had become such a permanent fixture in Hagrid's life that he couldn't remember how he'd filled all the hours in a day without him. He'd agreed before Dennis's fifth year that after Hogwarts the boy would stay with him, in the cabin on the edge of the forest, and learn the ropes so one day he could be the Keeper of the Keys and Grounds.

But before that, they had to get there. Before that, it seemed, they had another war to fight.

"There's a meeting tonight, Den. Order o' the Phoenix, you know. In the last war, youngin's at Hogwarts weren't allowed ta fight, and I'm not sayin' you should, but you mine o' well go to the meetings. I'm lousy at keepin' them secret, anyway."

And Dennis had beamed with such pride at being trusted with this responsibility that Hagrid turned scarlet behind his beard and gulped down his tea. So this was what being a father was: a long series of teaching and hoping they'd understand just to see that look on their face when they realize how much they really mean to your life.

**"Seamus? **Did I startle you? I'm sorry, I just wanted to see that you're okay."

"I'm fine, Harry. Sit down, you look like you're dead on your feet. How's Ron?"

"Joining the cause. He'll be alright. I won't let anything happen to him."

"Best laid plans, Harry. I don't know why you dragged him into this whole mess. There's nothing worse than losing your best friend."

"Shut up, Dean, I'm not dead and Harry needs the best fighters he can get. I'm sorry for leaving you in a lurch, you know."

"Not your fault, Seamus. You healing alright?"

"He gets nightmares three or four times a night, even with dreamless sleep. Luna's going barmy trying to figure out something that'll stop the screaming."

"Dean!"

"Well, it's true."

"Harry?"

"Yeah, Shay?"

"It's strange, but I spend a lot of my time thinking of our fifth year. Right after Diggory, you know? With the whole Ministry around the twist? I was right awful to you that year, believing the Prophet, laughing at you…"

"You came round, Seamus. I forgave you a long time ago."

"It's not so much that, Harry. I'm just trying to say that back then you got two dozen students to listen to you, and you were fifteen and everyone thought you were crazy. What do you think you'll be able to accomplish now?"

**.***.**

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	14. Getting Nowhere Fast

_"It's important to fight, and fight again, and keep fighting, for only then can you keep evil at bay, though never quite eradicated." **Dumbledore**_

**Getting Nowhere Fast**

**Ben** was getting nowhere fast in his relationship with Charlie Weasley.

First of all, he refused to acknowledge it as a relationship. Did he suck in his breath every time he saw Charlie sitting at the end of the bar, smiling at him over a drink? Yes. Did he look at the door too often, hoping Charlie would nip in for a drink at odd times, like eleven in the morning or two in the afternoon? Definitely. Did he look forward to the long hours they spent after last call, when it was just the two of them in the bar, talking about life and death and everything in between? Absolutely.

But at the same time, he couldn't believe that he was steadily falling in love with a boy. That just doesn't _happen_. Not in his family, not to anyone he knew. He'd always been into girls, always fancied himself with a pretty thing on his arm, a girl in a short dress who was besotted with him.

And it wasn't like he found all guys attractive, not even the ones people mooned over – Harry Potter and Dean Thomas had long been considered as the most fanciable blokes from his year, and he didn't find himself having any feelings for them on those frequent occasions when they entered the bar.

It was just Charlie. Charlie, who had been so fiercely protective of Ben the first time he introduced him to his brothers that none of them had dared to laugh, or even question their relationship. Charlie, who told the most outrageous stories, the best jokes, who could listen intently to a stranger's tale and feel real sympathy, who fretted over the lives of his siblings and had cried in Ben's arms about his parents. Charlie…

But could they go anywhere, anywhere from here if Ben didn't tell him that he'd once been known as Draco Malfoy? If he confessed to be the boy who'd poisoned Ron Weasley and attempted to kill Dumbledore, if he admitted to being a pompous fool who had looked down on people because of something as ridiculous as the makeup of their blood, would anyone believe that he'd really changed enough to be in a relationship with a person who he used to profess to despised?

Ben found himself sitting up at night, hoping he could be the man Charlie thought he was, hoping that he would have the strength to tell the man he (loved?) before the secret ate him from the inside.

**George** sat with his brothers at the Burrow. It was odd to see Hermione whisking around the kitchen and not the familiar form of his mother, and every time he thought of the comforting weight of her hand on his cheek or the pinched, concerned set to his father's mouth he would feel like he was going to cry again.

Luckily there had been nights with Fred, many nights just the two of them in the bedroom they used to share, and they'd cry to sleep together and then wake up to comfort the other. It was just so much harder now – the boys in their year at Hogwarts had gotten used to the fact that, more often than not, the Weasley twins were going to wake up in the same bed. It's just what they did. To Fred and George, the distinction between _me_ and _we_ just wasn't as great as it was to other people. And portraits just weren't as good bedfellows as a living, breathing brother.

But George found himself feeling immensely proud of the way his siblings had taken the sudden departure of their parents. Bill, stepping into the head of the Order even with a little girl and another on its way; Charlie, who appeared to be stumbling into a relationship with a barboy of all things (and had threatened to tear off the head of anyone who objected. Fred didn't. He'd known Charlie too long to disbelieve tales of his brother's ferocity); Percy and Lee, who were managing the Hogsmead branch so well it was a little scary; Ron, who was probably the happiest husband George had ever known. And then there was Ginny.

Ginny had her own story.

George's story was about the fact that everyone seemed to be doing so well when there was this whole other war they were supposed to fight. Isn't there a saying that every generation has their great battle to fight? They'd done their bit, paid their dues.

Maybe that's why it was so hard to get into the battle mode they'd been in a scant two years earlier, when Voldemort had taken over the Ministry and the Wizarding World was in chaos. Because they'd already fought that epic war, complete with prophesies and ancient treasures and hallows, and they didn't feel quite up to fighting a second one, thank you very much.

George, for one, would much rather be with Angelina, who was sitting next to him at the immense table, talking to Luna and holding Victoir on her lap and generally looking like she belonged there. George could happily envision himself spending the rest of his life with this girl, who completely understood his devotion to a portrait, who would laugh at his explosions and wand tricks rather than get angry, who had the temperament to deal with and have fun with half of the greatest wizarding pair in history.

But would he ever get a chance to just be? Would there ever be a time in his life when battle didn't loom in the distance, threatening to take it all away? George had thought that after Voldemort it would be over, and they could get on with their lives.

Now…now he wasn't so sure that this – this constant stream of battles and deaths and worrying and injuries and fighting – wasn't his life. Maybe it was his generation's lot to be constant warriors.

If that was the case, than they had definitely drawn the short straw.

**"Ginny**, what are you doing about Harry?"

"Harry? Charlie, I know you've been a bit busy lately but surely you've noticed that we broke up."

"He says that you broke up with him."

"Why are all of my brothers on Harry's side?"

"There aren't any sides, Gin. It's just that…well, you were always infatuated."

"How do you know? You were never _there_."

"Fair enough, but Fred and George gossip like old ladies, and they wrote me every month. Why not take up with Harry? He's quite morose without you. And, really, you couldn't hope for a better catch."

"Then why don't you go out with him?" Ginny snapped unkindly. Each of her brothers in turn had had a similar conversation with her over the summer (with the strange and notable exception of Ron, who seemed determined to stay out of the affair entirely, which was very out of character for him.) "You're taking up with boys now, aren't you?"

"Ginny." This was Bill from the other room. Their voices carried, apparently, through the echoing, empty halls of Grimwald Place. "You're my sister, but I've always liked Charlie more than you."

"Why is everyone against me?" Charlie was perplexed and a bit frightened to see Ginny close to tears. He couldn't remember a time when his tough baby sister had ever cried, especially in front of her brothers. "So I don't want to be the wife of the famous Harry Potter and do what everyone expects of me. Why can't I have my own chance at life first? Why do I have to settle down right now?"

"You don't have to." Charlie said. After all, he had nine years on his sister and was only just thinking about settling down. The thought of her marrying someone at all made him want to hit something. "Just…Ginny, you can't leave Harry hanging out there like that."

"Like what?"

"If you don't want to be with him, stop flirting with him. Don't deny it, I saw you at dinner the other night. If you give him hope he's going to latch onto it."

"So what do you suggest? That I not go to my own home for dinner anymore for risk of offending someone who isn't really part of my family?"

"Really, Ginny!" And now Bill appeared in the doorway, his scarred face tight with something like anger so he was truly frightening to behold. Charlie didn't flinch, because he knew how it pained Bill that he frightened members of his own family, but Ginny did, and this just seemed to make Bill angrier. "You know that Harry is as much a Weasley as anyone. Even Percy admits that Harry's more Ron's brother than he is."

"Fine!" Ginny choked, feeling silly that the tears were in her eyes again. Why couldn't they understand that she simply couldn't be with Harry, couldn't give her life over to the Boy Who Lived Twice when she was barely of age? How she wished for her mother, who used to know about boys and urge her not to get too much involved with them at a young age.

Then again, her mother had adored Harry. Perhaps her advice would have mirrored that of her brothers.

"I'll just leave then. Maybe some time away will help us both."

"Ginny!" Her two oldest brothers looked exasperated, and Ginny snorted, thinking it quite funny that the last thing she saw before she Disapperated was the two of them standing, bonded against her, rolling their eyes as if they had a clue about what she was feeling.

**Neville** hadn't had much luck in love.

There had been a time, a long time, when he thought he and Luna were going to end up together. They'd always been the odd ones out, and that kind of bond was not one to be shaken off lightly.

But then she'd shacked up with Dean, which he guessed made sense on some level – they'd survived Shell Cottage and a house full of Weasleys together, and he'd protected her through the battle. But still, Dean and Seamus had always been easily popular, likable and funny enough to get through Hogwarts with enough friends and enough memories.

There was no way he was getting in on that relationship, though. Two men and Luna might seem strange, but three men would have been plain wrong. So Neville, as always, conceded the fight before he really even tried, and watched from a distance as other people got his girl.

Other women had come. People he'd known from the DA, or from his studies abroad that year after his second seventh year. Some had known him by reputation alone (and how surprised Neville was when he realized he had a _reputation_!) From the role he'd played in the battle of Hogwarts.

But none of those had lasted very long, and by the time Neville settled down at Hogwarts to learn the ropes of teaching from Professor Sprout, he was twenty-one and had never had a steady girlfriend in his life.

But he had friends now, and colleagues, and people asked his advice and respected him and students adored him for his stories and his experiences and his easy-going personality.

And maybe that was enough.

**Oliver** Wood watched as the year passed. Summer, and the deaths that it brought, the wedding of two of the most famous people in the world overshadowed by so much badness. He hadn't been with Cho then, not really, not in any tangible way, but they'd both been at the wedding because Harry had invited him and Oliver, not thinking (he never thought about relationships, because how could they be anywhere near as important as Quidditch?) had brought along Harry's ex-girlfriend.

Autumn, and another war was starting. Quidditch was cancelled and Oliver didn't know what to do with himself. He joined the Order, run now by Bill Weasley, who he didn't know well, and Charlie Weasley, who he'd known and admired all through school. He became an important asset because Oliver had the singular ability to talk to anyone about anything, and seemed just slow enough that no one would suspect him of any grand schemes.

It was in the winter that he and Cho got together, when the holidays brought news of another round of deaths and the Order increased in size, trying desperately to counteract the evil around them. They kissed the day after Christmas, and Oliver thought vaguely that this would probably be his last Christmas. There was so much evil in the world, and so much of the old guard was dead, that they couldn't possibly counteract it. He fully expected to be killed before the next year was out.

Spring, and he saved Cho's life. She promised to be with him forever. He promised her a ring and a wedding once it was all over. But he didn't count on the guilt he felt, heavy as a physical weight, because in saving his beloved he'd passed up the chance to save someone else.

A year after the wedding the world was in chaos. A year after the wedding, Oliver Wood was sinking deeper and deeper into depression, stunned at the fact that that he'd passed up the opportunity to save the life of a Weasley when he'd saved Cho Chang.

**.***.**

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	15. The Weasleys

_ "Don't tell me. Red hair, hand me down clothes and a stupid complexion. You must be a Weasley."  
"Hey, Malfoy, lay off okay? She may be a pain in the ass, but she's my pain in the ass." **Draco and Ron, A Very Potter Musical**_

**The Weasleys**

**Bill **had been in the battle himself, which is unusual. So he saw his brother die.

It was difficult work, this directing of the Order of the Phoenix, and oftentimes Bill would be up so late looking at blueprints and coordinates, reading briefs and tips and statements, that he would fall asleep on the couch of Grimwald Place and wake up to Kreacher handing him a cup of coffee and informing him that it was six in the morning, at which time Bill would Disapperate to his job at Gringotts, the job that was actually bringing in the Galleons, and he would be lucky if he could see Fleur and his little girls between work and yet another Order meeting.

Harry, who was kindly letting them take over Grimwald Place for the meetings and didn't mind waking up to find a rather large Weasley draped across his living room, had confronted it about it one day near the end of that stormy, miserable winter.

"You can't run yourself ragged, Bill. I think I see more of Dominique than you do."

"I'm trying my best here, Harry." He pushed a pile of papers aside and saw an invitation to his own daughter's birthday party. "Is it nearly March already?"

"Yeah. Crazy, right?"

"I can't believe Victoir's already a year old." Bill stared at the picture of his little girl, squirming in the arms of an unseen uncle, laughing and laughing in the direction of the camera.

Harry cleared his throat. "She's two, actually. A year younger than Teddy." He smiled a little when Bill looked up in surprise. "And I think we're going to have to stop letting them get together so often. I think my godson has a crush."

"She takes after her mother." Bill said, trepidation evident in his tone. If there were boys chasing after his daughter when she was a toddler, he couldn't imagine her at fifteen.

Of course, she'd only live to see fifteen if he could get the Order together. More deaths, more attacks, more near misses, and Bill was wondering how Dumbledore and his parents and Lupin and Sirius and all the others had been able to stand it. Oh, he'd seen the last war, but he hadn't been running it then, not nearly. Now he'd been promoted to general, and how was a general supposed to operate when he was missing his daughter's birthday party?

"You know, I can help, Bill." Harry said, sitting on the arm of the couch and nodding to Kreacher as he slinked up the stairs.

"You're already doing too much. You and Ron have been in more skirmishes than anyone."

"But I don't have to worry about my family. You have Fleur and the girls and the whole Order, and it's not like your brothers are docile homemakers." Bill snorted, remembering Charlie's face as he tried to convince Bill that training dragons to fight the Death Eaters would be a fun project for the Order.

"I couldn't let you do that, Harry. It's…well, it's a lot of work."

"Come on, Bill. I know wars. Wars have been my whole life. Let me help out, okay? I can't stand seeing you on my couch every morning. It's frankly depressing."

Bill stared at Harry. He was The Boy Who Lived Twice, who had died and come back and defeated Voldemort and saved the Wizarding World, but he was also a young man who he thought of as a brother, who he'd first met when Harry was fourteen, long-limbed, skinny, with no idea what the Dark Mark even was. Could he hand over part of his burden to someone who he still thought of as a child? Could he afford not to?

"Okay, Potter. Let me show you what the inner workings of the Order of the Phoenix looks like."

After that day, Harry had been calling the shots much more often that Bill. But on a muggy day in April, when they received intelligence that a small nest of Death Eaters was hiding out in the sleepy town where a house known as the Riddle House stood abandoned on a hill, it was Bill who contacted the people who would be fighting, Bill who played general and field marshal, Bill who called the shots the day a red-head was taken down by a jet of green light.

**Ron** loved fighting next to Harry again.

"You take the left and I'll take the right." Harry said, leading the way to one of the entrances to the house where, according to Bill, there were about ten Death Eaters waiting for them. He and Ron were part of the advance guard. Oliver Wood and Cho Chang were on the other side of the house, crouching in a similar position, and George, Charlie, Bill, Ben, Dean, Luna, Neville, and little Dennis, who was seventeen and little no longer, were ready to Apparate in as soon as the fighting started.

"Why do you always get the right? I'm taller, I should get the right."

"Shut up, Ron." But Harry was smiling. "You know, we could actually die in the next ten minutes."

"You sound like Hermione." Ron couldn't help smiling as his wife's name left his mouth. Hermione had worked her twelve-hour shift for the Order the night before, and when Bill's summons had come in Ron hadn't the heart to wake her even to say goodbye. "We've been in about fifty of these. We would have died already if we were meant to."

"Still, I'll be happy when 'Mione's Felix Felices matures. A little liquid luck would come in handy with these things." Ron noticed his friend's hand shake and said nothing. Harry had seen more people die than Ron had, and since he'd started slowly but surely taking the bulk of the load of the Order away from his oldest brother, there had been subtle signs of the stress taking a toll. They needed a long weekend to regroup. Maybe if they could arrest these Death Eaters (or kill them, Ron wasn't fussed either way) then Ron could talk to Bill about taking Harry's name off the rotation for a forty-eight hour nap.

"Hey," Ron waited until Harry looked at him, and then quirked a smile. "I almost forgot. Hermione wanted me to invite you over tonight. Andromeda is dropping Teddy off and Fleur was going to come over to gab."

"Sounds great." Harry's wand had stopped shaking, which Ron took to be as a good sign. You couldn't go into battle anxious. And they usually didn't. Harry and Ron had been conditioned with seven years of Voldemort fighting through Hogwarts to see battles as something that happened regularly, something to break the monotony of life.

And, because they had another minute or so before they were due to storm the castle, so to speak, Ron leaned close to his best friend and whispered, "So what do you think Wood and Cho are doing on the other side of the house?"

Harry had to bury his face in his hands to smother his laughter.

**Charlie** hated fighting with Ben.

He could never concentrate on the fray in front of him with the beautiful bar boy at his side. And he couldn't bring himself to be dragged away in the course of fighting, less he go back to Ben only to find him bleeding and broken and dead.

So he worked it out so he and Ben had different shifts for the Order. If Ben noticed this, he never commented on it, and being around the Order without Charlie was giving the younger man opportunity to make them into his own friends. Charlie had been pleasantly surprised to go into the Leaky Cauldron after closing only to find Harry and Ron, the duo notorious for taking down fifty or so Death Eaters between them, laughing with his boyfriend in the dark.

But it had been unavoidable this time. Bill had come to Charlie in person, and Charlie had been with Ben, and Bill needed the hands, and Ben was a good fighter, and Charlie couldn't say to leave the barboy in the bar just for his peace of mind.

So here he was about to go into this battle with his boyfriend by his side. He wasn't the only one – some people liked fighting with their lover, their best friend. Cho and Wood were there together, in the advance guard no less, able to get in the beginning of the fight. Dean was here with Luna, both standing in the place where Seamus just couldn't be anymore. Ron rarely went into battle without his wife, and if Hermione hadn't just pulled a twelve-hour shift she would be right up with the two boys as if this was still their school years, as if they were immortal, as if nothing bad could happen at all.

When the signal came and they Apparated _en mass_ into the old house, Charlie did his damndest to make sure that he kept Ben in his sights, but there were so many people. Bodies and curses and smoke and furniture and walls and collapsed ceilings and now people lying on the floor and blood and more people and it was so confusing, so confusing, and he found himself shouting for Ben. Ben…

He rounded the corner and saw Ben right next to one of his brothers and Cho Chang. He tugged on Ben's sleeve and they left that room not ten seconds before that same brother was killed.

Charlie took Ben, not even thinking. Weasleys are hardy folk, can fend for themselves, and Fred hadn't even been taken down by death. But he would never forget that he'd been in the room, had had the opportunity to save someone, and had chosen a man he'd known for less than three years over his own blood, his own brother.

He would live with that for the rest of his life.

**Ginny** had stayed away from the Order long enough.

She was not made for sitting on the sidelines while others fought battles she should be in. So though she bummed around the country, staying with friends and other Weasleys, she always kept up with the latest battle, the latest war.

Lee Jordan was her inside man. Long ago, they'd reached a mutual understanding about the passionate, loud Weasley brothers. Lee kept her and the rest of the world updated to the condition of the Order, sending her letters with more information about her brothers, about the war, about Harry.

Harry…

But the point is that the day she heard Lee say something about a battle, something about them needing more fighters, she realized that she couldn't stay away any longer, that she couldn't play the child and coddle her hurt feelings when there was fighting to be done and every other member of her family was participating. So she went to Hermione, and Hermione came with her to the fight.

The two girls entered just as the tide was turning the Order's favor. This was not a happy time to be in battle, for the losing side, sensing the end, turns irrational, erratic, and unleashes spells they wouldn't try if the war had been going more favorably.

She lost Hermione immediately, because they had to dive out of the way of a curse and they ended up in two different rooms. She found a Death Eater and engaged him, finally managing to get a _stupefy_ past his dark magic, and sped on, unknowingly looking for a shock of jet black hair among all the others.

It was just a random series of events that put her right next to Oliver Wood, who had lost his wand and had noticed a Death Eater aiming for Cho Chang. His Cho Chang.

She saw Oliver dive for the wand, forgoing magic for years of Quidditch training. He was strong and he hit hard and the Death Eater's wand shifted from Cho to the person next to her.

Ginny didn't know that she screamed. She only remembered running forward, tossing her wand aside to cradle Percy's head in her lap. It didn't matter. He was already dead.

**George** left the Burrow first that night.

It was too much. Fred, three years before, and he had died on the other side of the castle. He was grateful, so grateful, for the miniature version in his pocket. But then there was his parents, not even buried a year, before another member of his family was taken out.

The rate of deaths was increasing exponentially. It was alarming. And George just couldn't bring himself to stare at Percy for too long. For a couple of years, he'd thought that Percy would have been better off dead than as a traitor to his family, to Dumbledore, to Harry. He hadn't been prepared for the lump in his throat, for the hot stone in his stomach at the sight of his brother, his reformed brother, this less uptight version of old stuffy Percy, dead on the living room floor.

"We have to go." George murmured, and Fred nodded from one of his many portraits in the Burrow. "We need to tell Lee. He was Percy's partner. He should know."

"Of course." Ginny said, squeezing his hand. George resolved to ask his younger sister where she'd been all these months later, sometime later, sometime after Percy's death stopped being like a hot iron in his heart. "The others will understand."

George picked his way past the kitchen, where Hermione and Charlie were patching up the many injuries sustained in battle. He patted Bill's arm. "It's not your fault, Bill." He looked at Charlie, who nodded, giving him permission to leave, the action showing that he would take care of Bill, who felt so much responsibility as the oldest.

He Disapperated, trying to figure out what he'd say to Lee. He remembered the first time he'd mentioned to Lee that he wanted his friend to run the Zonko's branch of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.

"Really?" Lee'd asked, as if he hadn't been friends with the twins all through Hogwarts, as if the joke shop hadn't been his dream, too.

"Yeah," George had rushed the next part, because he knew it was the part that Lee would object to. "Look, it's a big job, and you can't do it all by yourself." Lee looked at him expectantly, and George was sure that he was expecting George to say that Ron would be going with him to Hogsmead. "So you and Percy are running it together."

After the initial shock had worn off, Lee and Percy became a good team. Percy was exceptionally good at the business end of the business, balancing both branches' books, and Lee had learned salesmanship along with Fred and George. The two had formed a strong bond, too, a bond that sprung up naturally between people who worked together so often. Lee and Percy were often found laughing together in the back of the Hogs Head, both trying and mostly failing to pick up girls, being among the only bachelors left of their friends.

The news of Percy's death would hit Lee hard, and George didn't know how he'd bring himself to tell him. Still, he knew that it had to be him, him and Fred, because they'd gotten Lee into this whole business of the Order and the Weasley clan.

They would have told him, too, if they hadn't arrived at his flat to find the Dark Mark floating in the sky. Lee was gone.

**.***.**

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	16. Too Damn Short

_"You do care," said Dumbledore. He had not flinched or made a single move to stop Harry demolishing his office. His expression was calm, almost detached. "You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it." **Order of the Phoenix**_

**Too Damn Short**

**Bill** shrugged off Charlie's hand with a snarl that Charlie took with a raised eyebrow. "Your arm is very broken, Bill. If you give me a second…"

"You're not helping anyone, Bill." Hermione murmured. "Fleur's in the back room. She's watching his body. Maybe you should go to her?"

"The girls…"

"Ginny has them in the kitchen. She has gotten very good at explaining death to the kids." Hermione made sure not to touch his arm when she repaired it, and he kissed her absentmindedly on the cheek. What would they have done without Hermione?

Fleur looked up when he walked in the room. She'd dressed Percy in a different shirt, had wiped away the blood with cloths and warm water that was sitting next to the bed. It was a very woman-ish thing to do, and suddenly, inexplicably, Bill felt that he was about to cry.

And he did. Fleur closed the door with her foot and wrapped her husband in a hug, and Bill heaved great hiccupping sobs for the man lying on the bed, for the boy who had been his brother, who had fretted about them sneaking out to practice Quidditch and threatened to tell their parents but never did, never, because children know that they are bonded against the adults of the world. Because Percy knew that a relationship with a brother was more powerful than any other force in the universe.

The Weasley family used to seem so large, so absolutely impenetrable because of their sheer numbers. But not his parents were dead, Fred was floating in that strange between-world and _should_, by all rights, be dead, his Great Aunt Marge had died months ago, to no one's surprise or great sorrow, and now Percy. Percy…

And the world of the Weasleys was shrinking before his very eyes.

"It's not your fault." Fleur whispered from a great way away, and Bill knew that he would never believe her. Hadn't his parents always told him that the younger ones were his responsibility? They'd sent him letters while he was at school, asking him to look after Charlie and Percy, telling him that it was his duty as the eldest to watch out for them.

Well, he'd done a right good job of that, hadn't he?

**Hermione** couldn't take it anymore. She closed her hand around Ron's so that his thumb would stop playing with the Deluminator in his pocket, the one he kept switching on and off if he was nervous or anxious or grief-stricken. He never noticed it, never noticed the darkness, the light, the darkness…not until Hermione reached into his pocket and touched his hand, at which point he would blink and redden to the tips of his ears, like he had when they were children.

"Sorry, 'Mione." He muttered, and she flung an arm around his shoulders. She didn't have any siblings and couldn't empathize with the death of a brother, but she did know that she felt an ache in her chest when she thought of Percy getting colder in the next room.

She was just about to try to coax Ron towards the sink, to get some of that blood off his arms and face and neck, when the door flew open at the same moment Fred dashed into his portrait, screaming. Everyone came running then. From every corner of the Burrow were people, people. But the solid weight of Harry on her shoulder and the warmth of Ron's hand in hers was enough for her to face what could only be more bad news.

It was a strange moment, when everyone was staring at the twins and neither could talk. Their pale faces, their horror-struck expressions, and Hermione knew that they must have seen something awful. She also knew that she had never in her life seen the twins at a loss for words.

"Spit it out, then." Oliver Wood said, his voice hard and shaking with something like exhaustion.

"Lee. It's Lee Jordan, they put the Dark Mark over his flat." Fred valiantly barreled through the shocked intakes of breath. "It was in shambles -"

"Things everywhere. Radio equipment -" George put in, talking with the portrait as he used to talk to his living, breathing twin.

"Blood, too. They took him. They took Lee."

And then Bill was there, and his authority, his impressive figure, made Hermione believe that he would be able to do _something_. "How do you know?" He asked the twins. "How do you know he's still alive?"

"They would have left the body, wouldn't they?" Neville reasoned. "More of a warning then. They must have wanted Lee for something."

"He knows more than just about anyone in the Order, aside from Harry and Bill." Hermione said slowly, his face showing every expression as he pieced the puzzle together. "He has to, to understand the war and explain it to our people. He has the most up-to-date stuff, too. An unbelievable asset to them, really."

"Lee would never tell them anything." George spat, glaring at Hermione who put his hands up in a sign of peace. "You know that, Hermione. Lee would die before he gave the Death Eaters information about us."

Nobody spoke after that, because nobody wanted to point out the obvious – that Lee was very likely going to die if he didn't give the Death Eaters some information.

And what would the Weasleys do then?

**Dean** watched as the minutes passed, the days and weeks and months, until they weren't at the end of a very cold winter anymore but in the middle of the hottest summer anyone could remember. It was August, six months after Percy Weasley died and six months after the commentator of the new war went missing.

He and Seamus sat on the porch, looking out over their beautiful land. Dean had never been to Ireland before Seamus had persuaded them to move to a half-forgotten family home. Now he often wondered idly why it wasn't more populated. It was the most gorgeous place in the world.

They had both stripped down to their shorts. It was hot – hot as it never got in England, in Ireland, in places this far North. Hot in a way that was heavy and uncomfortable, in a still, sick way that made you wonder if the entire land wasn't just holding its breath.

Seamus's scars glistened in the sunlight, and they were many. The Carrows had gotten carried away that year that Dean hadn't been there to reign in Seamus's temper. They'd hurt Seamus badly, so badly, and Dean would look at him and feel like he was going to cry in a fit of sympathetic pain.

"Stop it, Dean. You're driving yourself barmy. I'm alright. It don't even hurt anymore. Not for years." Seamus always knew what Dean was thinking. Always. "Luna back yet?"

"No. I think she likes being around Hermione. That woman always seems like she knows what she's doing, even when she doesn't."

"Should she be out in this heat?"

"Hermione will make sure she's alright. She won't let anything happen to our baby."

The _our_ was all three of them. After the wedding…well, after the wedding things like _normality_ and _conventionality_ had gone out the window. There was nothing obscene about their relationship, nothing crude or awful, but Luna could not be with Dean when her heart skipped up her throat at the thought of Seamus being _crucio_'d at the wedding.

So they'd existed, the three of them, and while Seamus was convalescing Luna would go in and hold his hand and kiss him, and after he was well and the three were fighting again they'd go back to their secluded land in Ireland and fall into bed, three people trying to get as much love out into the world as it collapsed around them.

They could never think of it as wrong or immoral. The three loved each other so much it was impossible to think that such a love could be anything but beautiful. But they weren't naïve enough to believe that the rest of the Wizarding world would think of it that way, so they kept it on the down-low.

"So what are we going to do if the baby is white?" Seamus asked the wind, avoiding his best friend's gaze.

"What are we going to do if it's black?" Dean sighed, leaning back against the chair. "We'll have to live with the fall out either way. This kid is not going to be normal."

"Luna's his mother. He never got a chance at 'normal' from the start."

**Ben** was never very good at healing spells, so he was forced to Apparate back to the flat he was sharing with Charlie before he removed the bruise that was forming around his eye. And then, of course, Charlie wanted to know where he'd gotten it from.

"I work in a _bar_, Charlie. It's my job to throw out drunks. Sometimes it gets physical." At Charlie's livid expression he was quick to add, "It's okay. I'm a big boy. I can handle it."

"It looks bad," Charlie touched the raw skin and Ben jerked away, feeling irrationally angry about his boyfriend's presence. He swallowed hard before turning back to Charlie, who looked just as hurt as his eye felt. "This isn't about me, is it?"

"Not everything's about you, Char." But he collapsed onto the couch as he said it, and Charlie growled in the back of his throat and started pacing the floor, as if wearing a hole in their already worn carpet would help the situation.

"It's only your eye? They didn't say anything to you?" Charlie had to work to keep his voice at a normal octave but it came out strangled, a croak. Ben shrugged, looking fixedly at the couch, and it was at times like this where Charlie would remember with a jolt that he was, in fact, almost a decade older than the man he was dating. And he felt every one of those years between them now. "I'll kill them."

"Don't be dramatic, Charlie," Ben murmured, his lilting voice enough to make Charlie collapse on the couch near him, sighing as he pulled Ben closer. "Just the usual stuff, you know?"

And Charlie did know. He knew the things some of the patrons said whenever Ben would wink at him or Charlie would pull Ben in for a kiss every time he got another drink. Faggot and queer and fairy – he'd gotten them all and worse.

Except there was the undeniable fact that Charlie was a dragon tamer and had the scars to prove it, and Ben was a slim, dark young man who was around ignorant drunks all night. He definitely got the worst of the ribbing.

"I tried to get him to leave and he punched me. Thought being queer was catching, you know?" Ben bit his lip, and just as Charlie had felt every one of his years, right then Ben remembered quite suddenly that he was, or had been, Draco Malfoy, and what would Draco have done if he'd been called a queer in a crowded bar? He felt the familiar sneer begin to steal over his face and then stopped it. That wasn't him anymore.

"Anyway, Tom got rid of him. For a man who's over a century old, he can be very spry when he wants to be." Ben closed his eyes and leaned into Charlie's big body, relaxing further when Charlie muttered the spell to remove the bruise and his face felt whole and healthy again.

"What are we going to do?" Charlie asked, kissing Ben's hair and staring straight ahead. "I can't see you get hurt by these people. Don't they know we're fighting an actual war?"

"You're not going to change anything, Charlie." Ben said, squirming deeper until he could smell the ash and peppermint that always clung to Charlie all around him. "If this war has taught us anything it's that life's too damn short, you know? It's too damn short to not love how you want to love."

"I love you," Charlie said, holding onto Ben too tight, but the smaller man didn't protest. He liked being literally enveloped in Charlie's love.

**Ginny** took Lee's disappearance badly.

"It would almost be better if he were dead, you know? It's so horrible to say, but I just can't stop thinking of all the awful things the Death Eaters did to Seamus and Mr. Ollivander and…and I've known Lee forever. I used to like it when he visited on holidays, because no one else can keep the twins in line, you know? It's not like Percy – Percy used to try to just quash their spirits and they'd fight back harder. They'd always listen to Lee. Anyone would listen to Lee."

"I know, Gin." Harry swept his hair back, looking at the pile of papers he still had to go through if they wanted to get any attack in this weekend. And they needed an attack. So many deaths, so many disappearances, and Harry found himself often wishing he was back in the old war, when hallows and horcruxes had put an absolute deadline to the end. "But we've been looking. The twins barely sleep, they're so frantic to find some sign of him. It's been six months."

"I know," Ginny collapsed next to Harry, "I just…remember the Triwizard? Back when Percy was working for Mr. Crouch? His son, that awful Moody impersonator, transfigured him into a bone. What if…?"

Harry threw his arm around Ginny's shoulders and remembered when Hermione had mentioned the same incident after Mad-Eye died. Funny how things happen sometimes…

Like it was funny how he was sitting here with Ginny, because it was only those awful six months since Percy's death and Lee's disappearance and that debacle of a battle that he'd gotten back with her. Or she back with him, and Harry had accepted her apology gladly. He understood fame, and the allure of not having it anymore. Sometimes he'd think with longing of his old cupboard under the stairs, where he had been anonymous and unimportant.

That night that Percy died, Ginny had come over to where Harry was sitting with Ron and Hermione and feeling very much like a third wheel. She'd been crying, and had tried to explain through her tears that she'd gone into that battle thinking of nothing but finding Harry. "I miss you."

If they hadn't been at war, maybe Harry would have held a grudge, played hard to get, but he knew war. He'd seen too many of his young comrades die to actually think that they had all the time in the world to play a game. So he'd gone back to her, completely, because life is too short, too damn short, to pretend with something as important as love.

**.***.**

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	17. Lost & Found

_"That which he does not value, Voldemort takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence he knows and understands nothing. Nothing." **Dumbledore**_

**Lost & Found**

**Harry **hung tight to Teddy when they went into Luna's room. The four-year-old possessed Tonks's amazing ability – right now he looked like a miniature Harry, complete with a tiny scar – but his demeanor was (thankfully) all his father. Serious, calm, and stoic, Harry had fallen in love with the child four years ago and knew that at this point he had given his heart away.

"The baby is very, very small," Harry explained quietly. "Not like your cousins. You can't squeeze him or he'll break."

"I know, Harry." Teddy glanced up at him and smiled a thin smile that was so _Lupin_ it made Harry's stomach flip.

Seamus and Dean hovered around the bed and both extended hands to Harry when he got near enough. "Took a break from the war for little ol' us, Har?" Seamus asked, pumping Harry's hand just as a new father would.

"Wouldn't dream of missing this." Harry hugged Luna around her shoulders, careful not to disturb the quiet child in her arms, whose large, soulful brown eyes were staring up at him. "How are you feeling, Luna?"

"Oh, I feel amazing. Look at him!" She stared at her baby with such open adoration that Harry glanced away.

"Cute," Teddy declared solemnly, climbing onto the bed to get a better look and grasping the baby's tiny hand in one of his. When he touched the boy he changed from a miniature Harry to a very near replica of Dean. Luna laughed and Dean and Seamus both gasped in amazement.

"He's quite good, isn't he?" Dean said, smiling.

"Too good. I actually have no idea what he looks like when he's not changing. If he ever gets lost we'll never be able to find him." Harry hugged Teddy close, and the boy obligingly turned back into a small being with messy dark hair and brilliant green eyes.

Seamus brought in cups of tea, which brought some color to Luna's face, and they chatted as the sun slanted through the glass, casting rays on the dark-skinned baby curled up next to pale-as-the-moon Luna. The day was perfect, quiet, punctuated with silences that were even more comfortable than the easy chatter. But Harry couldn't help worrying for his friends, wondering if they knew what they were getting into, since most of the Wizarding World thought that Luna Lovegood had married Seamus Finnegan.

**Dennis **and Hagrid were on their backs, staring up at the star-speckled sky. It was late, so late that the castle was completely dark, so late that Dennis shivered under Hagrid's huge overcoat, the coat he'd donned for the first time on that September day so many years ago when he'd fallen into the lake.

Hagrid pointed out constellations in his low rumbling voice with the confidence of someone who had always had a passion for anything outdoors. Dennis felt himself falling to sleep, comfortable in the presence of the man who was a mentor, a guide. Comfortable in the knowledge that if he did fall to sleep out here on the great lawn of Hogwarts, he would wake the next morning in his bed, the tea kettle whistling, Hagrid bustling around.

All Dennis Creevey had ever wanted was a life of normalcy and routine, and he was so, so grateful that when he finally got one, he'd also inherited a father.

He'd almost fallen completely to sleep, curled up near the great rumbling mass that was Hagrid, when the sky was suddenly split with light and sound as a flying motorbike, one that had belonged to Sirius Black, then Hagrid, then Harry Potter, flew into the newly harvested pumpkin patch.

Hagrid was on his feet even before Dennis, running towards the screams to extract from the ruined bike George Weasley and the battered, broken, and quite dead body of Lee Jordan.

Dennis reeled at the sight of so much blood in a setting that had, just moments ago, been perfectly peaceful. "Get the Order!" Hagrid roared at him, and Dennis nodded convulsively, ducking into the hut.

"Fred!" Dennis slammed to a stop in front of the portrait, who was in the process of dashing frantically from one of his frames to another. "Fred, tell Madame Pomfrey first!"

"How's Lee? I haven't been able to see, not since that horrible place. Is he…?"

"Den!" Hagrid roared from outside, and Fred sped off, leaving Dennis to scramble around the hut for the first aid they kept there. But they only had supplies to staunch the blood from where a unicorn had gored you, the antiseptic to sooth the burns from stinging nettles. How could it possibly be enough to combat the wounds left by torture?

Dennis Creevey had, of course, heard about the Weasley twins' hunt for their best friend. It had become something of a sad legend, starting with when they'd pleaded with Harry to give them the flying motorbike. "Lee won't be in any condition to Apparate when we find him!" They'd said, and Harry had handed it over willingly, wondering if he was going to lose the twins to the same grief that had nearly taken George from them when his brother died five years before.

He rushed outside with the bandages and his wand. George and Hagrid had dragged Lee from the wreckage and were trying to assess the damage done even as Hagrid was trying to get George to go inside. "Yer almost as bad!" Hagrid was saying, pushing George away, "Get yerself looked at or yer family's hostin' another funeral."

"Lee…" But George was covered in almost as many cuts as the black boy laid out in front of them, and he let Dennis lead him to the side, trying to remember the few first aid spells he'd learned.

"It's going to be okay, George," he murmured, even though he wasn't sure Lee was alive, even though he wasn't sure if the poor man would want to be alive after being held by Death Eaters for eight months. "It's going to be okay."

**Neville** forced himself to wait until Harry and Bill had flooed in through his fireplace before running to Hagrid's cabin. Madame Pomfrey was already there, and tried to shoo the men who clambered up, pale-faced and short of breath. "I need to put these ones under. They won't last long."

"We need to see George." Bill cut her off, "We need to know if they were followed."

"He's in a lot of pain!" The matron said, outraged, "You will only prolong -"

"Hogwarts could be attacked again!" Harry said, cutting an arm through the air. "We need to talk to him _now_."

During this, Neville ran into Hagrid's cabin and looked around the cluttered walls until he found Fred's portrait. The portrait that was in most important places in the Wizarding World, because Fred was one vital part to their resistance that nothing else could match.

At the moment, though, that vital piece was falling apart. "Nev!" He shouted when he saw Neville gazing around the room. "How are they?"

"They're fine, Fred. Look, maybe you'd better go to Shell Cottage. The girls are there. They'll be so glad to see you." Because Fred and George had left three days ago and hadn't been heard from since. Because, so soon after Percy's death, the other brothers had been searching frantically for them.

"That's not going to happen, Nev. Get me down, mate. If you just take me outside I'll be quiet." He crossed his heart and looked at Neville pleadingly, and he'd never been able to resist a Weasley (who could?) and so he took down the portrait, even though he knew that it wasn't within Fred's capacity to be quiet.

And he quite liked it that way. At least one thing was normal.

**Bill** knelt next to George. "Georgie? You have to tell us what happened. Are you being followed? How'd you get Lee?"

But there was blood dripping from George's eyebrow, pooling behind his teeth, and Bill felt sick at himself for keeping him from medical attention. The good of the many. He had to protect the Order, his wife, his daughters.

"Leave him alone, Bill, I'll tell you." Harrumphed a grumpy voice from behind, and Bill turned around to see Neville come out of the house holding Fred in front of him. "You forgot about me, didn't you?" Fred accused, glaring at Bill who couldn't meet his gaze because he _had_ forgotten about Fred, about how George never went anywhere without one of his twin's portraits, about how he had no doubt seen everything and could not be harmed.

"Go on then, George. I don't feel up to sharing my portrait if you die," Fred said, winking. Then his smile fled when he turned to Bill and he was suddenly serious. "What do you want to know?"

"Everything."

Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting in the hospital wing after Bill and Madam Pomfrey had used a hovering charm on George and Lee. Fred had made a quick dash around his portraits to tell Fleur, Hermione, Ron, Ginny, Charlie, Ben, Seamus, Dean, Luna, Oliver Wood, Cho, and everyone else that George was safe and they'd recovered Lee and please, please hold off seeing them at Hogwarts until the following morning.

They sat in seats that Harry realized he'd sat in far too often at his time at Hogwarts. He had never gone a year without seeing the inside of the infirmary, and that was a high statistic even if you were a Quidditch player.

"They had Lee at that cave. Harry, you told us about it after Dumbledore died. Inferi in the water?" Harry nodded, feeling cold at the mention of the cave, of that terrible, terrible night.

"Poor Lee," Fred said, looking at his friend sympathetically, "No cloak, no shoes, and it was so cold. We know he wasn't the only prisoner there but they were in different parts of the cave, see, and we couldn't get to all of them before we knew we'd be found out. And Lee was so bad off."

He didn't have to recite the injuries, because Madame Pomfrey had made them crystal clear. Seventeen broken bones, including hip and collar bone which were both extremely painful. Two severed fingers. So many gashes on his back, healed, re-healed, half-healed, impossible to count. And hypothermia, malnutrition. He'd lost over thirty pounds, and he hadn't had near that many to lose. Harry couldn't even bring himself to look at the body on the bed, and he had been witness to may atrocities in his life.

"How'd George get attacked?" Bill asked, getting to the heart of the matter.

"Inferi." Said Fred, shaking his head. "Inferi and a couple of nasty Death Eaters. Goyle was there. I stunned him, and his mask fell off." Portrait-Fred twiddled his portrait-wand between his fingers. "I don't know how George managed to hold onto Lee the whole time. He got hit with that curse. The new one? Tore up his guts, it did. Thought he was going to die on the flight over."

"Why?" Harry asked, the word coming out sore and strangled. "I thought you guys took Hermione's _felix felices_." The potion had finally matured, and Fred and George were the first recipients.

"We did, Harry. And it _was_ lucky. We found Lee just in time. I'll take that as a win."

**Angelina** took George home before she turned on him. "What were you thinking?"

"You don't understand." George sighed, "Lee is my brother, as much as Bill or Ron or Charlie is."

"You think I don't know that?" Angelina snapped. "I remember the three of you in school. And I remember that when Katie died it was like losing _my _little sister." She grabbed George's wrist so he couldn't look away. "Why didn't you take me with you?"

George opened his mouth, then closed it. This _thing_ with Angelina had never really been labeled, identified. They'd been going at it for years, and Angelina had understood about Fred, about how when Fred died a part of him had died too, about how happy he was that his twin was clever and stubborn enough to cheat death.

Why hadn't he told Angelina he was leaving? Because he didn't want her to get hurt. It sounded old, and trite, but the truth is that if Angelina died…he couldn't even finish the thought. Life without Angelina would stretch on, monotonous, barren. But he couldn't tell her that.

"I love you," Angelina said, "I've always loved you. But if you don't let me into whatever secret sanctum you and Fred and Lee have then I'm out of here. I'm not going to be told that my boyfriend was killed in some raid that I didn't even know about."

George finally loosened his tongue and then did the only thing that made sense after the hellish night he'd had, after the blood and the Inferi and Death Eaters and thinking Lee was already dead, thinking Lee was better off dead, watching the color drain from Bill's face when he told him about the pact between the Death Eaters and those who were dead.

He got down on one knee and looked up at the girl he'd long thought was the most beautiful girl in the world. "Angelina." She gaped at him, and he could tell by her eyes that she was warning him that this had better not be another joke. "I can't imagine living without you. You are beautiful, and smart, and I love you." Okay, so he wasn't good with words, but the truth of the sentiment seemed to be dawning on Angelina, who looked like she was going to cry. "Will you marry me?"

"Of course!" Angelina lifted George up and kissed him, and kissed him, and kissed him, until the horrors of the day before were little more than another story to add to the growing pile of war tales.

Fred applauded from the wall, "The answer to everything! When things get bad, put on a wedding." He went to go tell the girls, who would be thrilled to have a wedding rather than another funeral to plan. "What are we going to do when the last bachelor gets married? We'll have to attract the Death Eaters in a mundane way."

**.***.**

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	18. Debriefings and Proposals

**_Ginny: _**_Seems silly, doesn't it? A wedding? Given everything that's going on?  
**Harry: **Maybe that's the best reason to have it. Given everything that's going on._

**Debriefings and Proposals**

**Lee** shook his head. "I thought they were lying. They said…so many things like that." He looked up at George. "Percy's dead?" Imploring the red-head to take the words back.

"Yeah." George squeezed Lee's hand. He was still so weak. So weak, and thin, and broken. But he'd been asking for Percy (who was, after all, his partner at the Hogsmead branch of Weasley's Wizard Wheezes) and George could never lie to Lee.

Lee didn't move for a moment, and then he suddenly moved all at once. "Tell Harry I'll see him tomorrow. Tell him I'll tell the Order everything."

So the next day, against Madam Pomfrey's and the twins' warnings, Lee sat in front of the whole Order. It was less than a week after he'd been rescued. "You need to know this," he'd told Harry from his hospital bed. "There's some stuff…" But then he'd drifted off again, lost in a world of pain and exhaustion.

He was working on making his hands stop shaking. He took a deep, shuddering breath and glanced at George, who put a hand on his leg and squeezed reassuringly. Lee managed the smallest of smiles – any comforting touch was welcome after the days of pain he'd endured.

"They're getting weaker," Lee said finally, each word requiring so much physical effort he almost couldn't push them out. "They're getting careless, too. Goyle and Blaise are still the leaders, but there's a lot of rumbling about how they're running the show. Everyone was expecting another Voldemort, and Goyle is not exactly on the same intellectual level as You-Know-Who."

Ben hid his laughter in a cough, possibly thinking about a time when Draco had been friends with Crabbe and Goyle, dumb and dumber.

"There's going to be a mutiny, and it's going to be soon. I know you don't want to hear that we should just wait them out – I know everyone wants an end to this war. But it might take a month, or six, and they'll self-destruct." Lee ran a shaking hand over his face. He was sweating profusely and felt like he'd just run a marathon.

"I can give all my evidence about this later. George has helped me write most of it down." George produced a thick file and threw it on the table in front of him. All damning evidence about who had done what where, who had said what about whom. Lee had been close to death, but he was a reporter at heart and remembered important information like any good journalist would.

There was a rumbling around the room, and then Oliver Wood stood up, looking shameful but determined. "You know we think only the best of you, mate," he said, "and we're right glad you're back with us in one piece. But I think we all need to know how much you gave up about the Order."

George growled in the back of his throat and now it was Lee's turn to hold onto his friend's knee. "It's a legitimate question, Georgie." He turned back to Oliver. "Nothing, Wood. I told Bill and I told Harry and now I'll tell all of you," he looked around at the faces, so much younger than those who had been the leaders of the last war, "I know they took me because I had a lot of information and I knew more about every aspect of the war than just about anybody. So the first thing I did when they banged through my door was _Obliviate_ myself."

There were gasps around the room and everyone looked around at each other. Harry, Bill, and George, who'd heard this all before, just looked sad.

"Maybe if I hadn't done that I would have been able to fight my way out, but I decided a long time ago that if anyone came for me I would do everything in my power to make sure they had absolutely no chance of getting information. That was the best way I knew how." Lee shrugged, though he still couldn't forget the utter helplessness that had washed over him, seeing the Death Eaters pour into his flat, looking down at his wand and realizing he knew absolutely no spells.

And he hoped that no one would ask him to discuss those months that were really just strings of seconds put together. Because he couldn't remember how many times he was subjected to the _Cruciartus_ curse. He couldn't begin to number the times when his skin was sliced through with _Sectumsempra_. He wouldn't be able to accurately recount the feeling of knowing you could die – wanting to die – every second of the day.

But no one asked him anything. Oliver Wood stared at him so hard that Lee looked down. Now his entire body was shaking, not just his hands. Strange how these things happen.

**Ginny** was not trying to be a cliché.

She wasn't throwing her life away for Harry, for any guy. But she didn't want to throw her life away to avoid him, either.

And there was something to be said for the feeling inside of her whenever she saw Harry across the room, always surrounded by a ton of people because he was _that_ guy. And when she was with him she was _that_ girl. And she liked that Harry made things happen. She liked that he was the leader of their entire army.

She liked that he loved her so much that his face went soft and ridiculously happy when she walked into the room.

She liked that Harry would stumble over his words when she was around him, as if her presence made him, one of the most powerful wizards in the world, forget where he was.

She liked that her brothers adored him. In the Weasley family, marriage was something of a family decision (with the exception of Fleur, who was accepted only after the first Battle of Hogwarts) and if Fred and George were against you, you didn't really stand a chance.

She liked that being around Harry made her feel weightless, and looking into his eyes made her feel like she was flying, and when he held her she felt like electricity was going from his hand into her body.

Ginny was trying not to be a cliché. She was trying to give them enough space to figure out whatever they had to figure out before they became a couple again.

But one drunken, fear-filled night, after another battle, after so many injuries and so much blood, after it felt like the only way to be alive was to be with another person…

After that, she found out she was pregnant.

And she'd so wanted to avoid being a cliché.

**Bill** ran a hand over his face and studied the numbers. "We're winning?"

How was that possible? There were more dead in this war, this war of small skirmishes and no big battles, this war without meaning and without end, this war without a Vodemort and pure-bloods and mudbloods and everyone in between. So many had died defending against people who killed for the pleasure of it.

"Yes." Lee said, flipping through the pages of his book. He was sitting, because even though he'd been rescued a month before he still had next to no strength (once, Bill had taken Lee out for drinks, and he'd heard stories of starvation and whippings, of lies and threats, of _crucio_s and _sectumsempra_s, and Bill had felt sick, wondering if he would have been able to endure all that, wondering if he could have ever made the decision to _obliviate_ himself, because he saw how Lee struggled to remember faces and dates that used to be easy for him.) "The tide is turning. People don't want to fight on their side any more. There's not a lot of trust."

"And we have Harry," Bill said. Lee nodded, because that was all the explanation anyone needed. Harry was someone who could rally the troops because of his history and because of the way he drew people to him. The term _natural leader_ had been made with Harry in mind.

"We have Harry." Bill said, again, Disapperating from Grimwald Place with the hopes that he could tell everyone the war would be won by Christmas.

**Charlie** glanced up when Ben popped into his flat with a loud _pop. _"Christmas music?" The other man grumbled, hopping onto the counter and kissing Charlie on the cheek. "Really?"

"I like it," Charlie turned up the muggle radio. _I'll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams_ filled the apartment and the music died away.

"How was your shift?"

"Alright. Wood was jumpy again. I think he's still broken up about Perce. They were in the same year."

"I'll talk to him," Charlie had been meaning to visit Wood anyway, who, with Cho, had moved to the same little corner of Ireland where Seamus, Dean, and Luna lived. Going to the lush countryside was always like going on holiday. "No one hurt?"

"Dennis Creevey. I took him back to Hogwarts. Hagrid nearly bit my head off – you'd've thought I'd cursed him." Ben pouted grumpily and Charlie touched his leg, smiling sympathetically. For some reason, Hagrid was one who'd never taken to Ben suddenly appearing in their lives.

"I ain't got a problem wit' ya, Charlie, ya know that." Hagrid had said when Charlie confronted him about it. "It's jus'…I don' like the look o' that one. Shifty. Like he's hidin' somthin'."

Charlie had behaved coolly towards Hagrid for a while, and his favorite teacher had since been making an effort to like Ben. He wasn't the only one. Though Ben had been a loyal friend for four years, there were some like Ron, like Hagrid, who would sometimes mention to Charlie how off they found his boyfriend.

But he didn't care. There were others who talked behind his back about the relationship. He would risk a hundred whispers a hundred times for the feeling he felt when he took Ben into his arms.

"Move in with me?" Charlie whispered, the words almost gobbled up by Bing Crosby singing about a little drummer boy.

But Ben heard. Ben knew him so well he'd probably been waiting for the question from the start. "Of course."

**"Angelina?"**

"Fred, I'm busy, can you please go bother someone else?"

"It'll just be a tick. Would you mind very much if you shared your wedding?"

"I told George that you'd want to double. Can you get married? How do you get a ring?"

"Not me. Someone else will double. Do you mind?"

"No. Why do Weasleys always have the strangest requests? As long as I know the couple I don't mind."

"Good. You're getting married with Ginny and Harry and it'll probably be the biggest wedding the Wizarding World has ever seen. I already told Lee you were good for an interview about it, he's expecting you in ten minutes."

"What? Fred? Fred!"

**.***.**

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	19. Respite and Nepenthe

_"Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light."__ **Dumbledore**_

**Respite and Nepenthe**

**Harry** and Ron sat across from each other and for a long time neither said anything. They were both exhausted. Ron was still panting slightly – ever since his wedding he hadn't been quite the same. Something had broken inside him on that day, and though he would do anything to keep up with Harry he just couldn't move as fast anymore. Sometimes during battles he'd start to shake. Sometimes afterwards he'd cough blood. Hermione still didn't know, because there was a bond between Harry and Ron that was deep and strong, and Harry would keep Ron's secrets until the end of time.

"What about the baby, mate?"

"Honestly, I was sure you and 'Mione would have a couple of kids before I had one." Harry shrugged. "I have Teddy. I would have been content with him." He looked at Ron, then ducked his head. When the whole thing had come out, it had been Ron's reaction he was most worried about. This was so much more than going out with his sister.

And, indeed, when he'd Apparated into the Burrow the first time after the news came out, Ron had pinned him against the wall and Hermione had hung back, because there were some things that went on between these two that she couldn't get involved with. "You're going to marry her." Ron had hissed through his teeth.

"Was planning on it, mate," Harry said, patting his arm. Ron had pulled back then, looking chagrined.

"Well," Ron said, running a hand through his hair. "I always knew you and Gin would get together. Just didn't expect it to be like this."

"It's okay." Harry said, thinking of the night before, when he and Ginny had started to change Grimwald Place from a headquarters of battle to a home. They'd laughed, and chased each other, and he'd ended up hugging her around the waist, his hand over her belly, trying to feel the baby he knew was growing in there. She was four months pregnant. They were getting married in two weeks.

"Got a preference?" Ron asked, sinking further into the chair. He coughed, there was blood, and Harry felt every nerve in his body go on end. Was Ron deteriorating, breaking from the inside? What would he do without Ron, his steadfast and loyal Ron? When the silence stretched on, Ron raised an eyebrow and flashed a quick smile. "I'm not dying, mate. Just tired." He stretched. "Preference? Boy or girl?"

"Oh." It was hard for Harry to concentrate on babies when there was blood on Ron's shirt. He'd have to change before Hermione came in. "I don't care, really. I'd like a girl, though. Don't want Teddy to feel like he has to compete with a little brother."

"He won't. Everyone in the Wizarding World knows you love that kid." There was a popping sound and then a whoop outside the door. Ron smiled at groaned at the unmistakable sounds of Fred and George. "Just remember that twins run in the family, mate. You might be getting more than you bargained for."

**Charlie** was shaking when he walked into the bar, and Ben looked up from the glass he was cleaning with a smile that turned into an _O_ of surprise when he saw his boyfriend's black eye. "Charlie! What happened? I thought you were meeting up with some friends tonight." He was thinking: what kind of friends would let you get attacked? He was thinking: my God, I hope it wasn't Death Eaters.

"Some friends." Charlie spat, sitting on a stool as far away from Ben as he could get. Ben slid down the bar and tried to kiss him, but Charlie turned away, face cold.

"What happened?" Ben pleaded. "Were you attacked? Are you alright? Is anyone else hurt?"

"Nothing. It's nothing."

"Someone hurt you, Charlie!"

"It doesn't matter," Charlie sighed. His hands were shaking. "I overreacted."

"Tell me," Ben said, dropping the glass and picking up one of Charlie's hands. They were cold, impossibly cold, and though the night was chilly it didn't merit this. "Tell me, or I'll hunt down those friends of yours and hex it out of them."

Charlie grinned a little. He didn't know where Ben had learned so many nearly-Dark hexes, but he found it rather amusing when the younger man used them. His smile faded when he tried to find the words, because he couldn't stall any longer. "They just…they said we were depraved. That our relationship is wrong. I would have let it go at that – I don't care what they think. But they made…they threatened you." He looked up at Ben and clutched desperately at the bar boy's hand. "As if with this war needed something else to worry about."

"Let them say what they want." Ben declared, kissing Charlie's fingers, his neck, his lips. "I love you. I love you so much that my feelings towards you could never be considered wrong."

And Charlie, who had just been in a duel that had turned into a brawl with men he'd known since he was a Firstie, who had come into the bar an emotional wreck looking for some comfort, found it in Ben's embrace.

What they felt for each other couldn't be wrong. Since when was love wrong?

**Neville** sat with Hagrid outside the hospital wing. "He's going to be all right, you know. Dennis is made of strong stuff."

"Was all my fault!" Hagrid muttered, his great hands shaking as they gripped Neville's shoulders, hard. "Should've remembered the herd gets feisty this time o' year. Winter solstice so close, you know? But they've been good to Den, never gave him no trouble…"

"Grawp came by before they killed him, though. You must be proud of that."

Here Hagrid managed a small smile. "Aw…Grawpy likes Den. Everyone likes Den."

And this was true – five years after the Battle of Hogwarts, Dennis Creevey was only nineteen years old, yet the students respected him utterly. He taught beside Hagrid in Care of Magical Creatures, and suddenly the vast stores of information Hagrid knew were translated by Dennis's bubbling personality and natural people skills. They were a good team. A better team together than either could ever hope to be apart. And they needed each other.

"What'll I do if he doesn't pull through this, Neville?" Hagrid asked hopelessly. "He's my son."

Neville started but tried to cover it up. After all, hadn't he seen Hagrid bent with Dennis so often, the bigger man teaching the smaller one how to handle plants, how to pick up wounded animals? Hadn't he often envied the ease in which they interacted? Didn't he know, or guess, that their relationship went past that of a mentor and an apprentice?

Hagrid stared at the door to the hospital wing, willing it to open. "He's my son."

**Cho** sat with Wood and wondered when she'd have a baby.

Ginny was pregnant, although she'd heard through the grapevine that this wasn't exactly a planned thing, and the hasty wedding was something to chortle at a little. So even the great Harry Potter could be a little hasty…But Ginny was pregnant, and Luna's beautiful little boy had visited not a week ago. He was a month old, and was fussed over by Dean and Seamus alike while Luna chatted with Wood about Knargles and Heliopaths.

Angelina was sure to have a baby soon. Weasleys enjoyed big families – just look at Bill, head of the Order and already with two little girls. And Hermione….poor Hermione had already been pregnant twice to Cho's knowledge, but had lost both the babies.

Lost the babies.

Lost babies.

"Cho? Have you ever thought about…well, about kids?" Oliver asked, looking over his shoulder at her. She got up from her chair, sat on his lap, and kissed him long and hard.

**Fleur **read to the children splayed in front of her. Victoir, very serious, hugged her little sister around the waist. Fleur couldn't help but smile whenever she looked at her youngest. Little Dominique was the spitting image of her father, with a wide, open face and laughing blue eyes. She had a ruddier complexion that Victoir's porcelain doll features, but of course the biggest difference was the hair. Dominique had red ringlets that tumbled in waves down her face and back (so much hair! And she not even two!) and Victoir had the straight almost white hair of a veela.

Victoir was a miniature Fleur, and Dominique was all Weasley. Sometimes, Fleur was very happy with the way life turned out.

"Mummy, will papa be home soon?"

"Very soon, dear."

"Mummy," Victoir hugged Dominique like the younger girl was a lifeline. "Will papa die? Uncle Percy died."

Fleur was surprised Victoir remembered that. Percy had doted on the girls, as the whole family had, but his death had come right after Dominique's birth. That was a long time for a child to remember. "Papa will not die."

"But…" Victoir's tiny, nearly invisible eyebrows came together and she tried to work through the problem. "But other people died. Right? Uncle Fred…wasn't Uncle Fred dead?"

Fleur dropped the book, then dropped onto the floor to scoop the girls into her arms. Dominique, too young to really vocalize her worries, just buried her face in Fleur's long hair. And Victoir clung to her, and Fleur could feel the girl's small body shake with fear.

"Your father will not die." Fleur murmured, and kept repeating it until it was like a prayer, a promise.

And she wondered exactly how much her daughters knew about life, and war, and death.

**.***.**

**please review.**


	20. Hogwarts, Again

_"Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home."** J.K. Rowling**_

**Hogwarts**

**Harry**, Ron, and Hermione went back to Hogwarts at the beginning of the New Year. It was a week before the wedding, and a month before Hermione's new book was supposed to come out. It was the story of the trio's second year at Hogwarts and Hermione had just told the men beside her the title.

"The Chamber of Secrets?" Ron repeated. "Well, I guess that works. Although I always remember second year as 'the year my wand wouldn't work.'"

"Only because you and Harry thought flying a car to Hogwarts was the most brilliant idea in the world," Hermione snapped, sounding for all the world as the bossy child she had been when they'd walked these halls as students. Hogwarts had a way of bringing that out in people.

"Where does Lee want these pictures done?" Harry asked, looking at the vaulted ceilings and remembering that this was the first place he'd ever called home, his only true home. Somehow, between wars and deaths and pregnancies, he'd forgotten how much Hogwarts meant to him.

"He gave me a list," Hermione extracted a piece of paper from her purse. Lee Jordan, who had been the first person to promote Hermione's book about the trio and the hunt for Horcruxes, had since fallen into the position of Hermione's agent and PR. Not that they needed to promote the books much – they flew off the shelves almost as soon as placed there. Everyone wanted to know the inside story of the Boy Who Lived Twice. "I don't know if we should go down into the Chamber, though."

"I don't really fancy that, no." Harry said, peeking over Hermione's shoulder. "But we can do the trophy room. My God, Ron, do you remember? We got awards for Special Services to the School that year."

"We should have gotten awards every year," Ron muttered, "Between Sorcerer's Stones and rescuing escaped prisoners and fighting against evil wizards...I don't think we got through a single year without causing a stir at the end…"

The trophy room was almost never visited, except by students doing detentions for Filch, so they had the space to themselves. Harry wandered up and down the rows, peering at this trophy or that one as he recognized names. Dumbledore had one, and so did Tom Riddle (that was ironic).

"Hey, Harry. Look at this." Hermione was pointing to a small curved trophy almost hidden behind the plaque of the 1989 winning Quidditch team, with Charlie Weasley grinning from the front, Seeker and Captain.

But what Hermione was pointing at was another award for special services to the school – this one awarded to James Potter.

Every time Harry found something about his parents buried in the depths of Hogwarts, he felt his stomach flip, felt his face burn red. Sometimes he thought of his parents as almost not real people at all, as stories he'd been told of fictional characters doing heroic deeds.

"Wonder how he got that?" Ron mused, looking at Harry carefully. Harry shrugged, moving one finger forward to trace the shape of his father's name.

**James** Potter looked at his best friend incredulously. "You didn't."

"You should have heard what he was saying to Remus. I swear he knows something, and if he gets proof he's not going to be quiet about it either."

"So you decided that the best way to take care of Severus was to send him down to the werewolf?" James was already digging in his trunk for the invisibility cloak. Sometimes he was sure that Sirius just didn't _think_. "And what will happen if he finds him?"

"He'll get the scare of his life, and good for him too." Sirius shrugged, unconcerned. James rolled his eyes. "What? I figure we'll come up behind Severus and tell him we'll make sure he would regret it if he tells anyone about Remus's furry little problem."

"Blackmail? Sirius, really…" He threw the cloak over the two of them, leaving a hasty note for Peter. Getting through the Whomping Willow would be harder without him, but this couldn't wait. "And what would happen if the wolf actually bit him?"

"Remus doesn't bite." Sirius scoffed, as if they were talking about a tame puppy and not a vicious magical creature.

"The wolf does." James said, hurrying down the stairs. "You know Remus can't control himself."

Sirius still couldn't admit he was in the wrong. "Snape would deserve it."

"And then they'd kill Remus. You know this, Sirius. You know that the law says no werewolf can bite a human."

"It wouldn't be Remus's fault! You just said -"

"Yes, and there's no such thing as prejudice in this world, Sirius! Really, you've seen the way people act whenever you mention werewolves."

"As if we don't have bigger things to worry about, with Voldemort attacking people left and right."

"You can't change the ways of the world just because you want to! If they put Remus to death for this it will be on your head."

That made Sirius speed up, nearly tripping over the cloak. It was ten minutes to the full moon.

**Sirius** didn't want to wait outside. "Moony needs us." Isn't that why they became animagi in the first place? So Mooney would have something to do at nights, so they could go on adventures together as animals and Remus wouldn't have to worry about turning one of them. So he wouldn't have to be alone.

"Like you were thinking about Moony when you planned all this." James was nearly trembling with rage. He couldn't remember being ever being so mad at his best friend, but the thought of Moony biting Snape…of Remus being killed for something he couldn't control…

James watched the Whomping Willow carefully, trying to gauge the right time to go. Sirius nudged him and pointed to a long stick that pointed right at that knot in the tree. "He's already here."

"Damnit! We're out of time." James started creeping forward, then fell back as a branch cut into his cheek.

Sirius's whole body shook, and the next instant an enormous black dog was in his place. The dog stared at the branches for a heartbeat, two, then darted forward and pressed the knot with its snout. The last move the tree made was knocking Padfoot twenty feet into the air.

"Sirius!" James cried, looking at his friend, torn between going in and grabbing Snape and making sure Sirius was alive. The dog didn't stir…

His feet moved of their own volition and he clambered down between the roots of the tree, through the corridor. "_Lumos,"_ he muttered, running at a crouch, straining his eyes for a glimpse of that greasy-haired git he'd come to find. "Snape!" He called, and was that snuffling he heard, the first whimpers of a howl? Moony was changing tonight, and the werewolf couldn't control itself…

He rounded a corner and there Snape was, his own wand out, looking through the doorway with an expression of pure fascination. He didn't notice when James threw his arms around his waist and dragged him back, looking in the door himself in time to see the wolf rear its head.

"Potter!" Snape snarled, spinning out of James's grip. "Associating with monsters? What would the adoring fans think?"

"Get out of here, Snape!" James shouted, pushing his shoulder. "I mean it! Do you want to get bitten?"

"You will, too, Potter." Snape drawled, "And I don't see you moving."

"I know Remus." What James wanted to do was shift into a stag, but he didn't need a Slytherin finding out all their secrets tonight. He shoved Snape again, and maybe it was the howl of the wolf that finally got the boy moving. He ran out into the corridor and onto the lawn. He didn't notice the great black dog lying, unmoving, at the base of the tree.

**Remus** sat with James as dawn broke over the horizon. Madam Pomfrey would be coming with blankets and medicine, as she did every full moon. He'd tried to move James but couldn't – his friend was out cold. "You git," he muttered again and again, rubbing James's bare shoulders with his scarred hands. "You absolute git. Why'd you stick around, huh?"

After Moony had smelled human blood that was it. Usually the Marauders transformed into their animal forms before they were even near to the wolf, but tonight had been different. Remus could just remember seeing another figure fleeing down the corridor, could only be glad that when he pounced James had already had the presence of mind to change into his stag, filling the entire passageway and preventing the wolf from chasing after the smell of blood.

But he couldn't control the wolf's instinct to bite, to tear, to kill. He fought with the stag, left the animal bloody, whimpering softly, whole pieces of skin torn off. And he couldn't stop, not until daybreak came and the painful transformation happened again, and he found himself sitting next to one of his best friends, hovering on the edge of death.

A couple of charms had ensured that James would not pass into the next world, and now Remus could only sit with his friend's head on his lap, smoothing back the blood-soaked black hair, murmuring soft, meaningless words.

It would be a half hour until Madam Pomfrey found them. She would transport James up to the hospital wing where he'd stay for two weeks. Remus left his side only for class, feeling so guilty he wanted to tear his heart out.

It would be an hour before Sirius, who'd been knocked out cold all night, would be found by Hagrid and taken back to the giant's cottage to have his wounds looked after. He stayed as Padfoot most of the day, shivering next to the fire, wondering how everything turned out. He, too, would stay in the hospital with James, feeling his own guilt over what had happened.

It would be four hours until Dumbledore swept into the hospital wing, glad to find both James Potter and Remus Lupin there. He told them that he'd had a long conversation with Severus Snape, and that the Slytherin had sworn to keep the secret of the Shrieking Shack. Remus looked so relieved at this that Dumbledore felt a pang in his heart.

He told James that he would be commended quietly with an award for Special Services to the School. James shook his head, slipping back into sleep before he could explain to the Headmaster that he was just glad to have spared his friend from an execution rooted in old prejudice.

**Ron** let Harry stare at the trophy for a while, then clapped his friend on the shoulder. "Come on, mate. Let's take these picture for 'Mione and then go visit Hagrid. He might know something about your dad."

"Yeah," Harry said, forcing a small smile. "Yeah. It'd be nice to visit Hagrid again."

Hermione held up her camera, motioning for her two favorite men to stand beside their own award for Special Services to the School. Harry's smile was almost genuine, and when Ron looped an arm around his shoulder he did the same to the red-head.

And Hermione took the picture, preserving the moment in time. She couldn't stop staring at the award given to James Potter, though. Couldn't stop wondering what it was for.

And couldn't stop feeling so, so sad for Harry, who would never get to ask his father that question.

**.***.**

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